What to Expect From Qt 4

An anonymous reader writes "A presentation given by Matthias Ettrich (director of Qt development, author of LyX, and founder of the KDE project), was given to the annual KDE Developer's Conference in Nove Hardy, Czech Republic. In this presentation, Matthias details what's going to be new in Qt 4.0, which will be used as a base for the next version of KDE after 3.2. Apparently, Qt 4.0 will not only include faster startup times and lighter memory usage, but will have sweeping architectural changes, including a splitting of Qt's GUI classes and non-GUI classes."

Comments

It Sounds Nice

[Jeagoss]

but, is it absolutely essential? In a time where code needs to remain compatible due to the large amount of projects that are depending on that code, huge architectual changes implemented in a large number at one time will just show that the project wont get used for quite a while. It will take time for developers to start supporting the new format, which will leave end users wanting.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[siliconwafer]

The lighter memory usage and faster startup times sound very nice. Maybe not essential, but nice.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Coventry]

Remember, QT is a library, and trolltech makes their money from it. I'm pretty sure that all that will be needed for most apps using current QT is a recompile with the new tools (QT has a tool used as part of the Make process). To use the new features might require changes to code, but thats a different story - you're already changing your code to add new features.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Angry White Guy]

Sometimes it's better to throw the baby out with the bathwater. KDE has always had backwards compatibility problems, this will be no different, just a bit bigger.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[stratjakt]

Qt 4 mostly tries to preserve source-compatibility with a little search and replace and a COMPAT compilation switch. More porting will be required for styles and code that uses the meta object system directly.

Out with the old, in with the new.

Developers can adapt or fail. It doesnt seem wise to quit working towards better systems because some guy doesnt feel like replacing his widgets.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Overly Critical Guy]

Why are Linux users so afraid of change? It's the very reason we suffer through so much legacy compability to slow things down.

I welcome any sort of innovation. People will update their apps to meet any changes.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[_Sharp'r_]

Faster startup times? Maybe M$ will steal the code and the world will save millions of man hours. Think of the benefits to the world economy!

(Note: This is a joke. This is only a joke. If you didn't like the joke, then please just move on and leave me to enjoy it by myself. Thank you for your participation in this joke advisory.)

Re:It Sounds Nice

[originalTMAN]

Running Gnome apps under a faster lighter KDE (my preffered desktop) sounds good to me. It is probably better as a selling point for moving forward with the whole linux on the desktop thing.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[ded_guy]

I dunno--sometimes things have to be broken to make them easier, faster, or more flexible or to allow for future growth. Or sometimes just because there is a Better Way. Look at the breakages going on in Perl 6.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Jeagoss]

I'm not saying change isn't good. Change is very good. The thing I see here is they aren't only implementing 5-6 new features and a small architecture change. Yes, they are trying to maintain source compatibility, but the style of coding is just far antiquated. Personally, when I write code, I implement a new feature, get it working very very well, and then move on to the next feature. This leaves room for other projects to implement the new feature, and start using it, while I then move onto the next feature. It proves to be a very stable, dependable method of coding. I'm not saying everyone should code this way, and I'm definitly not saying I'm better than everyone else. Rather, I am giving my unwanted $0.02. Coding in such a syle really lets people move forwared, in a very steady pace. Remember, the rabbit didn't win the race. The turtle did cause he was very steady and persistant.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[ealar dlanvuli]

You've apparently never upgraded to the "new" Windows "platform".

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Jeremi]

They're essential for me! Right now my app takes too long to start up, especially under Windows and OS/X (it's pretty snappy under Linux, hmm)

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Jeagoss]

Besides reading my profile, what is to say I am even talking about QT for a personal use, or even QT for linux. I work for a company that uses the Professional Version of QT for development of "in house" applications which run mainly on FreeBSD. Source compatibility isn't always the best thing. A recompile of our applications isn't the quickest thing either. And after the recompile, we still have policies that say we have to test the new compiled app for 2 weeks before we push it to the network, just to make sure everything is stable. Big change costs money. Our company is far from scared of change. We just need to consider the investment of time and manpower to cope with it.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[mnmn]

No it doesnt have to be compatible.

Think of the benefits of sleepycat DB versions as their architectures changed, it improved across incompatible version.

QT is nice and sweet as it is, we dont need too many changes too fast. Programmers are now getting really used to QT3, dont EXACTLY need a version 4 with a different interface to start learning.

Of course if they're slimming it up more and making it faster (like FLTK) without adding too much other stuff, adding more database drivers and porting to more architecures, well its worth it.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Otter]

Developers can adapt or fail.

Remember, though, that we're talking about volunteer developers. If they fail, there's no one rushing in to take their customers. I remember when the KDE 3 plans were being made, there was a recognition that KDE's weakness is in the number and quality of apps and so there was a goal of keeping the APIs stable for as long as possible.

Now, greatly improved startup time would obviously be a huge reason to switch as soon as possible. Since pure Qt apps already start much faster than KDE apps, though, I wonder how much speed KDE would really gain.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[HanzoSan]

Thats what we should do in theory, but you have these people who are getting paid (trolltech) or (gnome), and they want to be on the cutting edge because its fun and they get paid.

You, the user however hate changes to the inner workings of the system because you are forced to learn new APIs, and all that.

Why turn Linux into Windows?

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Vann_v2]

Are they volunteers, or does Trolltech pay them? After all, they do sell licenses for commercial use.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Vann_v2]

As a business I have to assume they know what their customers want. As a developer I know this is exactly what QT needs. Everyone talks about how great QT is compared to Gtk+, but it does have a lot of brandead things. Some easier-to-spot examples are things like variables that should be const but aren't and no way to tell a UI element from a non-UI element. The latter is being addressed and I can only thank them for that.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Anthracks]

I think he meant those who are writing Qt apps include volunteer developers, and if their Qt app stops working suddenly with the new version they have less time and incentive to upgrade to it.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Hard_Code]

They aren't *forcing* you to use QT4 though, right? That is the great thing about open source...you don't HAVE to be forced to upgrade...so all this hand wringing over adding features/changing things is sort of pointless. If you don't like it, don't use it.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[GuyWithLag]

Remember, the load time is mostly due to dynamic library linking. My guess (I don't use KDE) is that KDE has a lot more symbols, objects and virtual methods than Qt, thereby slowing down the application initialization, as these have to be made during load time.

In the Gnome world, gnomemm - the C++ wrappers for Gnome - have more or less the same problems.

On the third hand, prelinking has increased dramatically the load times of OpenOffice. Happy happy, joy joy!

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Otter]

Yes, and in particular I was talking about the issue of when to switch KDE development to the new Qt. A lot of third-party KDE development got sidetracked during the KDE 1->2 transition, and it was made a priority to avoid another major code breakage for as long as possible.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[ArsonSmith]

Faster startup and smaller size. by 6.0 stuff should start before you click on it and it should fit in less that 640k. Haven't we been promised these two things in every version so far?

Bigger and slower is all I ever seem to get from KDE.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[asciiRider]

why are linux users afraid of change?

Uptime.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[JohnFluxx]

And how do you add the feature of reducing the memory footprint and so on?

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Library Spoff]

err i've got quicktime 6...

move along pleez!
oh the patter...

Re:It Sounds Nice

[sketerpot]

From the article:

Qt 4 mostly tries to preserve source-compatibility with a little search and replace and a COMPAT compilation switch. More porting will be required for styles and code that uses the meta object system directly.

Not much Qt code uses the moc system directly, since this is deep black magic and typically a bad idea. They're preserving compatibility, and it seems like a pretty small price to pay.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[nvrrobx]

*gasp*

Have you ever looked at Qt's libraries and wished you could use them outside of X?

"...but will have sweeping architectural changes, including a splitting of Qt's GUI classes and non-GUI classes."

That in itself has me and a few of my friends sold that we need a new Qt!

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Moreover, backwards compatibility has caused a some of the most braindead "features" (drive letters, CRLF autoconversion, dual 8.3 / normal names, etc.) of certain, um, other OSes. If you can improve something and keep compatibility, great, but if you can't, by all means, improve it anyway.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Wolfrider]

--Somebody may mod you funny, but I swear to God I thought the next KDE was going to be based on Quicktime just like OS X. I screamed "NOOOOO they must be stopped, the code bloat - my God the code bloat!"

--Then I started reading the posts and got cleared up. (whew!)

Re:It Sounds Nice

[nitehorse]

You obviously don't remember KDE 2.0.

If you really want to see the difference, then, please, by all means - either install KDE 2.0 binaries, and watch how long KDE takes to start up and work, and then try KDE 2.2, and then 3.0, and 3.1. If you really just want to be lazy, then try just going from 2.0 to 3.1 - there is an insane amount of speed difference.

As far as things go from KDE1 - well, KDE1 was insanely fast compared to KDE2 and KDE3, but it also had almost none of the features that we're all enjoying with the newer releases.

But KDE has been getting progressively faster as time goes on, not slower.

Faster?

[Kenterlogic]

I have alwways preffered Gnome to KDE because of speed issues (and the new Gnome is a lot prettier). But if this new base is much faster, then I may be forced to start using KDE again. Then again, my G5 should be arriving soon-- so forget Linux.

Re:Faster?

[axxackall]

I am still choosing gnome over kde on my G4 and G3 machines, both running gentoo linux/PPC ... Oh, I got it! You'll get g5 which is power enough to run OSX fast enough, right? But why to switch to OSX when you can still run your beloved Linux/PPC even on G5? Or other any known problems to run Linux on G5?

Re:Faster?

[jester]

I always have preferred KDE to Gnome for speed issues, memory usage issues, application availability issues, etc etc. The actual speed ups in Qt4 are in the article ... 14% was quoted, so why say "if this new base is much faster" ?

Re:Faster?

[Chad Page]

I used Win3.1 briefly recently when I got a laptop at a thrift store. I don't see the resemblence at all - KDE 3.1 looks *much* more like Windows 95, but with AA fonts and more themability ;)

Re:Faster?

[westyvw]

Nah your G5 is comming and then gentoo will make it ROCK!

This is what I really want from Trolltech.

[elvesRgay]

This stuff looks pretty cool but there is one thing I keep thinking of when I think Trolltech.

How about if they buy back the 4.1% of their stock from the Canopy group and the 1.6% of their stock from the SCO group so I don't have to feel dirty about using thier products. I know its a small percentage, and I do like QT, but still, it's unpleasant seeing their logo here.

I'll bet if they could they would buy that 5.7% back. And since its probably expensive to buy back, and Canopy and SCO likely don't want to sell its a pain and a source of fustration to TrollTech.

Re:This is what I really want from Trolltech.

[AugustMoon]

Big deal. There is no law against having your stock owned by questionable companies. Furthermore, no publicly traded company can really control who buys their shares. They are publicly traded, any one can buy or sell the ownership.

It doesn't automatically mean Trolltech inherits all the vices of every one who owns shares.

I would not be worried or even morally concerned until Trolltech's business decisions go south. Minor share holders don't dominate a company. Even 5.7% isn't a lot.

Re:This is what I really want from Trolltech.

[fault0]

No... trolltech is _privately_ traded, so they can control who owns their stock. However, ~5.6% is pretty much nothing when their employees own more than 60% of their stock.

Re:This is what I really want from Trolltech.

[pmz]

so I don't have to feel dirty about using thier products.

I despise Microsoft, for example, and use only Solaris, OpenBSD, and Linux at home nearly 100% of the time, but I still cannot avoid owning Microsoft stock via my 401K mutual funds (retirement takes priority, here). Corporate ownership via stock is more an affirmation than anything else. Qt is really a damn good product, and investors show that by buying stock (affirmation of good product). Microsoft, on the other hand, is simply the richest most powerful software company on the planet, and I'm powerless to tell the S&P 500 managers that they should take my ethical considerations to heart (affirmation of being more powerful than the President).

Re:This is what I really want from Trolltech.

[boomgopher]

Look man, in this world, it's almost pointless to think that way. I mean Saddam Hussein has/had a lot of stock in the Hachette Filipacchi magazine group (Elle, Car and Driver, etc.)
So I guess we should have boycotted those mags, but there's probably a million other examples like that.

Re:This is what I really want from Trolltech.

[GreatOgre]

Big deal! Nearly 65% is owned by the employees (~70% if you count the Trolltech Foundation which probably votes with the employees). Plus, the chances are the employees will eventually buy back even more of the stock.

Re:"ligher memory usage"

[notanatheist]

Perhaps you'll have your choice. "Lighter" would be more compliant with other window managers and making better use of apps or "Higher" for more eye-candy.

Here's what I expect

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Qt is great (well, if you like C++ and you don't mind the QPL), but there's really one thing I'd like: when will it ever have a font scheme that allows me to use AA fonts together with non-truetype X11 core fonts?

Re:Here's what I expect

[localghost]

The free version is released under both the QPL and the GPL, you only have to accept one of those two licenses to use it, not both. So if the QPL bothers you, just accept the terms of the GPL instead.

Re:Here's what I expect

[Dionysus]

If you don't like the QPL, you can always use the GPL. I'm amazed people still don't know this.

Re:Here's what I expect

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

No no, I'm talking about the dual-licensing thing. The GPL/QPL is a bait-and-switch scheme : the more people use it under GPL, the more it'll become standard, and the more people who want to make commercial products will be compelled to use Qt as a de-facto standard and be forced to pay the Trolltech tax.

Don't get me wrong, I like Qt and I think TT's market grabbing scheme is pretty slick and fair, from a company out to make money, but I've paid for and had to endure enough non-free (free as in beer) software to be wary of them. Too bad I find Gnome so ugly, otherwise I wouldn't use KDE for that very reason.

Re:Here's what I expect

[Soul-Burn666]

Unless ofcourse you are developing for Windows aswell. And then you either use the free and extremely old version (2.3.0) or pay the TT tax for the new vers.

Re:Here's what I expect

[DanMilburn]

You're aware that the QPL is, more-or-less, an open source license right? People didn't like it because it didn't meet the Free Software Foundations definition of free (meaning that, according to a strict interpretation of the GPL, it was illegal to distribute KDE in binary form), so Trolltech started licensing it under the GPL, leaving the option of accepting the terms of the old license instead.

As for dual-licensing it commercially and as free software, well, I don't see how that forces anyone to do anything. If you make non-free software, you pay the fee for a commercial license, and it's been that way since Qt was created. The growing success of Qt might encourage people to do this, but they're certainly not forced to. And if that happens, hey, Trolltech are successfully creating and supporting free software, and managing to make money. I don't see that as something to be wary of.

Re:Here's what I expect

[DanMilburn]

Since when did paying the license fee for commercial software become a 'tax'?

Re:Here's what I expect

[LMCBoy]

Sure, you can choose the GPL version of Qt/X11, as long as you don't intend to use it with KDE. Essential core parts of KDE are licensed under BSD, and so cannot be used with the GPL'd Qt, only the QPL'd Qt.

Re:Here's what I expect

[localghost]

The Windows version isn't "free", it's "non-commercial". Trolltech does not see the point in releasing Qt under the GPL in Windows, since the entire Windows operating system is proprietary. They do release the latest version under the GPL for MacOS X.

Re:Here's what I expect

[fault0]

> will it ever have a font scheme that allows me to use AA fonts together with non-truetype X11 core fonts?

It has since Qt 3.x already. Qt 2.3 did not support doing this, however. Qt 2.2 and earlier didn't support AA fonts.

Re:Here's what I expect

[Dr. Evil]

Trolltech are successfully creating and supporting free software, and managing to make money. I don't see that as something to be wary of.

Yep, it's a great arrangement... now... as long as they're making money.

There's nothing to stop Troll Tech from becoming unreasonable in their licensing demands... crippling all commercial KDE development. Since KDE is a desktop environment, commercial development is pretty important.

Only GPL software development is safe under KDE.

Re:Here's what I expect

[Vexalith]

What if I don't like either? Things like this should be licensed under LGPL or a BSD-style license, or you just shouldn't bother. Say I write GPL cross-platform applications, but what if I wanted to pull my own dual licensing scheme and sell it as commercial product with some closed source enhancements? I can't do this with QT without paying Trolltech. Basically Trolltech are preventing people making money of QT software unless they receive their dividend. This is why Sun can't use QT in OpenOffice/StarOffice and it's also why Ximian can't and doesn't use QT.

Re:Here's what I expect

[Anonymous Coward]

You are confusing development with execution.

The QPL explicitely grants the use of Qt as a runtime for any "legally developed application" that needs it.

So, you could just get a QPLd Qt and use it as a runtime for the GPLd code.

Alternatively, you could get it under both licenses, since it is dually licensed. There is no reason to choose one license.

Re:Here's what I expect

[bongoras]

"There's nothing to stop Troll Tech from becoming unreasonable in their licensing demands... crippling all commercial KDE development. Since KDE is a desktop environment, commercial development is pretty important."

Yes there is, it's called the GPL. If TrollTech decides to do something loathsome in a future release of Qt, the previously released versions will still be there under the GPL, and anyone who wants to will be able to modify it, fork it, etc to their hearts content.

The GPL is what ensures that the freedom in free software -- both free as in beer and free as in RMS -- STAYS free.

Re:Here's what I expect

[dspeyer]

I doubt they'll do that, because if they did, we'd immediately fork the last GPL version, and they know it. They'd wind up competing with us from an equal start, knowing that the big show-case projects that give them name recognition (KDE etc.) are going with the free version.

I think Trolltech will stick with their current strategy, it seems to be working.

Re:Here's what I expect

[be-fan]

So let's see. You want to use Trolltech's excellent toolkit, without paying them for it? Great... Hell, according to the FSF, stuff like this is supposed to be GPL'ed! Why do you think the LGPL is called "The Lesser GPL?" RMS says that "when a library provides a significant unique capability" it should be released under the GPL. Qt is one of the best GUI toolkits out there. Its a competitive advantage for free software projects like KDE to have it be GPL rather than LGPL.

Re:Here's what I expect

[maxume]

This comment doesn't make any sense to me. I was under the impression that the BSD licences were quite a bit more free than the GPL(in the sense of what you can do with the code), and that anything under BSD could pretty much just be relicensed as GPL, if so desired. I even thought that this was partly where the GPL got its 'viral' moniker, as changes made to the GPL version can not be reitegrated with the BSD stuff unless they are explicitly dual licensed to ease the process.

My bad. Or can somebody back me up a bit?

Re:Here's what I expect

[be-fan]

You don't seem to understand how the GPL works. A derived program can be licensed under any GPL compatible license. Thus, it is entirely legitimate for KDE (which is a mix of LGPL and BSD) to use Qt, which is GPL, since LGPL and BSD are both GPL compatible licenses.

Look, just Read the KDE licensing page. Neither the FSF nor the Debian Project have any futher complaints about KDE's licensing mix. I think they know just a little bit better than you how the GPL interacts with varous licenses.

Re:Here's what I expect

[be-fan]

They *can't* do that. The Free Qt foundation (made up of two members of TT and two members of the KDE Project) ensures taht Qt will always remain free. If TT goes away, or decides to discontinue work of the Free edition of Qt, the latest version automatically becoms BSD licensed.

Re:Here's what I expect

[LMCBoy]

Hi be-fan,

Funny you should mention the FSF, since they have this to say on the issue in their GPL FAQ:

Q: If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any program which uses it has to be under the GPL?

A: Yes, because the program as it is actually run includes the library.

See the part where it says all apps linked to a GPL'd library must be under the GPL? It unambiguously excludes "GPL-compatible" licenses in this statement. If you still aren't convinced, that very same FAQ defines a "GPL compatible license" this way:

Q: What does it mean to say a license is "compatible with the GPL".

A: It means that the other license and the GNU GPL are compatible; you can combine code released under the other license with code released under the GNU GPL in one larger program.

The GPL permits such a combination provided it is released under the GNU GPL. The other license is compatible with the GPL if it permits this too.

See the part where it says the combined code must be released under the GPL?

So, I'm afraid you're mistaken when you say that a program linked with a GPL'd library can be licensed under any GPL-compatible license; the FSF explicitly says such code must be GPL'd.

The mistake in my post was not a misread of the GPL, it was my interpretation that you have to choose between the QPL and GPL. Apparently, the dual-license means that both are applied simultaneously. (That's quite a trick, seeing as how the FSF says the QPL is not GPL compatible, but whatever, I am not arguing that point...) However, I stand by my point that you couldn't run KDE with a GPL'd Qt library, if Trolltech offered a disentangled GPL license for their library.

It seems to me there are issues here that are routinely swept under the proverbial rug...

Re:Here's what I expect

[10Ghz]

What if I don't like either? Things like this should be licensed under LGPL or a BSD-style license, or you just shouldn't bother. Say I write GPL cross-platform applications, but what if I wanted to pull my own dual licensing scheme and sell it as commercial product with some closed source enhancements? I can't do this with QT without paying Trolltech. Basically Trolltech are preventing people making money of QT software unless they receive their dividend. This is why Sun can't use QT in OpenOffice/StarOffice and it's also why Ximian can't and doesn't use QT.

I'm really sick and tired of the people who whine about Trolltech, Qt and it's license! Basically they are insisting that TT must provide them with tools for free so they could write closed software for profit. What they are saying is a perfect example of "Do as I say, not as I do!". Those supporters of free software whine when company offers a toolkit that is not only free (as in speech) but it also encourages them to write free software as well. They preach about free software, but they stop preaching when it starts to be about their own software-developement. They demand everyone writes free software but they want to write closed software themselves. Hypocrits!

KDE ...

[biggj]

I have had trouble's with KDE... It tends to be bloated and slow. But but there are a lot of useful apps on it, so maybe this will fix some of it's issues.

Re:KDE ...

[DarkSarin]

bah I use windowmaker with both gnome and kde apps. it starts up much faster, and I can live with the very few defincies that i have found.

Trolltech and Canopy/SCO

[bstadil]

As you know 4% of TrollTech is owned by Canopy of SCO fame. We need to put some pressure on Trolltech to make sure that nobody from Canopy is on the board or has any saying whatsoever over Trolltech

I have switched to Gnome until further

Re:Trolltech and Canopy/SCO

[JumpSuit Boy]

So is Novell and they are releasing products that run on Linux and they have been saying that their fight with SCO is not over yet.

Re:Trolltech and Canopy/SCO

[Anonymous Coward]

Novell is not part of Canopy. The former founder of Novell started the Canopy group as a tech fund but Novell has nothing to do with Canopy these days. It is interesting to note that the Canopy groups home pages has a quote from Darl McBride and their latest news proclaims the termination of IBM's AIX license.

Re:Trolltech and Canopy/SCO

[torpor]

Fuck you bastard, its not a troll!

This is *serious*. Qt is at the core of KDE, and Trolltech is a Canopy puppet.

Re:Trolltech and Canopy/SCO

[be-fan]

Dipshit.

A 5.7% stake hardly makes TT a "Canopy puppet."

Hint: Look at Canopy's website. Note that TT is listed under "Portfolio Companies." Understand that this in no way means that they are controlled by Canopy group. Hell, Microsoft owned about as much of Apple after their $150 million investment. Did that make Apple a Microsoft puppet?

Re:Trolltech and Canopy/SCO

[jesco]

Another kind person posted a link to a List of Trolltech's owners. SCO/Canopy is listed with no more than 6%, whereas the employers of Trolltech own 65%.

Now get off your crack-pipe and stop being paranoid.

Re:Trolltech and Canopy/SCO

[Arandir]

Take your fudding ass and get it out of here! And take that yapping gnome with you!

Canopy owns less than 6% of Trolltech. Trolltech employees own more than 60% of Trolltech. SCO (a minor precancerous growth on Canopy) has absolutely no control or influence over Trolltech. And even if they did, there's the Free Qt Foundation they would have to contend with.

Re:Trolltech and Canopy/SCO

[mandolin]

Hell, Microsoft owned about as much of Apple after their $150 million investment. Did that make Apple a Microsoft puppet?

Wasn't that right about when Apple decided that Microsoft wasn't "the enemy" and that Dell was?

(umm, I could be very wrong though, I don't pay much attention to Apple news.)

Re:Trolltech and Canopy/SCO

[be-fan]

Not really. Dell is more naturally their enemy, because Apple is, and always has been, a hardware company. Their software is just a draw for their hardware. Besides, you obviously haven't seen any of the "Switch" ads recently :)

Re:Trolltech and Canopy/SCO

[yomegaman]

Hey, I bet Bill Gates has some money in a Wilshire 6000 index fund. OH MY GOD! That means he now controls IBM, Sun, Red Hat, Intel, ATI, nVidia, etc, etc, etc...

KDE & KDE apps

[nuggz]

I had the opposite experience.
I now run KDE, and mostly gnome apps.

You could probaly just run gnome with the KDE apps just fine.

Re:KDE & KDE apps

[biggj]

Yeah, that's what I do, but I had to install kde-base, kde-libs, et al, that was when the trouble started. It may have been an isolated issue, but it turned me off from KDE reguardless.

Re:KDE & KDE apps

[zenyu]

You could probaly just run gnome with the KDE apps just fine.

The secret to doing this and still having reasonable application startup times is to always leave one runing KDE app. I use kworldclock, just put it on an extra virtual desktop. This keeps their object broker running (CORBA/COM++ish thingy), and keeps major qt/kde libraries in memory.

Re:KDE & KDE apps

[CommandNotFound]

I wonder if one could create a 20-line Gnome tray applet that has the K gear icon, an "exit" popup menu, and just sits there so kdeinit will stay open?

Re:KDE & KDE apps

[CableModemSniper]

Could probably make it headless for that matter. Just have it in the session startup scripts and it would exit when everything else did.

RTFA!

[Anonymous Coward]

Paragraph 2:

"Qt 4 mostly tries to preserve source-compatibility with a little search and replace and a COMPAT compilation switch. More porting will be required for styles and code that uses the meta object system directly."

How much stuff do you think uses the meta object system directly, aside from the internals of KDE?

Re: RTFA!

[Rimbo]

Jesus, I was wondering when someone was going to say this. Qt developers obviously aren't reading slashdot. other than you and me, that is :D

I think the large number of complaints is that although source-compatibility is -basically- maintained, you still have to recompile your apps. One of the nice things Microsoft has done is that you don't have to recompile your Win32-based app to work in .NET -- well, not completely, anyhow. This does have the side effect of dirtying up the API a bit. So it's a trade-off. Backwards compatibility does make GUIs easier for people to adopt -- who wants to constantly have to download new apps to work with the latest version???

Re: RTFA!

[kiskoa]

One of the nice things Microsoft has done is that you don't have to recompile your Win32-based app to work in .NET

Win32 app working under .NET? What do you mean working under .net? .NET is a managed environment, a JIT-ed world with bytecode, GC etc. (like Java)

Win32 app doesn't run "under .NET". They are binary code, they have no connection to the managed runtime.

Or you mean Windows 2003 Server (known previously .NET server)? Now I understand why did MS drop the name. Confuses people.

Actually Windows 2k3 Server did break compatibility in some places, that's why you need to to download separate patches for example.

Re: RTFA!

[Jungle guy]

Windows is so big, bloated and unstable because you have great binary compatibility. I can get Visicalc, one of the first spreadsheet programs for PCs, and run it under Windows XP. Many closed source programs compiled for old version of glibc, with old gcc versions, don't run under new Linux systems, and kde programs can be even a greater pain. I know it sounds like a troll but, unless you stick with the RPMs provided by your distribution, you have difficulties to install binary software in Linux, as most open source programs are distributed on a source format. I heard that even if you use the source you might have problemas: the gcc 3.x might break some software that compilled under gcc 2.x, because the old version was more tolerant to bad writen code.

Re: RTFA!

[Kunta Kinte]

I think the large number of complaints is that although source-compatibility is -basically- maintained, you still have to recompile your apps. One of the nice things Microsoft has done is that you don't have to recompile your Win32-based app to work in .NET -- well, not completely, anyhow. This does have the side effect of dirtying up the API a bit. So it's a trade-off. Backwards compatibility does make GUIs easier for people to adopt -- who wants to constantly have to download new apps to work with the latest version???

What on earth are you talking about? I think you should clarify your post a little, cause sounds like you're saying .NET is source compatible with Win32 API or MFC.

.NET is in no way, shape or form source compatible with Win23 API or MFC. Anyone who's spent five minutes looking at the .NET Foundation Class Libraries would know this.

.NET runtime will have absolutely nothing to do with a Win32 app or MFC based application. Not unless you're just pointing out that MS is currently supporting both Win32 and .NET platforms, so you can run those apps side-by-side.

So yeah, you can pull in unmanaged routines using .NET's 'Marshal','Interop' functions, but do not expect to pull in your entire MFC or Win32 gui int a .NET application that way.

And plus your entire GUI event pump is different, so I don't see that working well for a gui anyway. Using the interop functions is like using JNI in Java to pull in C/C++ code, I'd say. Not the most elegant way to do things.

Moving from MFC, or worse yet plain Win32 to .NET is a major rewrite. Many of us have to do it cause you know MS is going to make it very difficult to stay. Already documentation in the new MSDNs is leaning heavy to .NET. But hey, it's their prerogative right? I mean my years of investment learning MFC/Win32 API doesn't mean anything right? Not that I'm not bitter or anything.

I worked on moving a non-gui MFC based parser class to managed C++, and that was a lot of work to keep things on the CLR at all times. It was like we basically ported to a new platform.

...Which really is what it is.

Re: RTFA!

[Spy Hunter]

One of the nice things Microsoft has done is that you don't have to recompile your Win32-based app to work in .NET

What are you talking about? If you want your app to be CLR code, of course it has to be recompiled. If you want it to be written in C#, then you have to completely change the source code. It is the same with QT. If you want to use the new capabilities of Qt 4, you have to recompile, and maybe change your code some.

If you don't want to change anything, you can continue using {Qt 3/Win32 API} and your applications will still work fine, with {Qt 4/.NET} applications running at the same time. This approach wastes memory, of course, since there's a lot of duplicated code when two systems are running at the same time, but the problem is the same for Windows as it is for Qt. You just don't notice it for Windows since there's no way to get rid of the legacy Win32 code. With Qt, and especially with most Linux Qt apps being open source, it is possible to port everything over to Qt 4 and dump Qt 3.

Remember the transition from Qt 2 to Qt 3? I don't think I have any Qt 2 applications on my system anymore. It wasn't a problem last time. OTOH, Microsoft's approach of always retaining backwards binary and source compatibility has resulted in Windows becoming a huge pile of convoluted code that is the epitome of the "More Than One Way To Do It" philosophy. Except that almost every way to do it is a hack around some older way to do it, which itself is often poorly documented and/or buggy.

Re: RTFA!

[Jeagoss]

I have a fully working system, with apache, a mysql database, fully working kde, and tons of libraries and fullfillment programs, and I am only using 2 gig s of space. I dont have any source code on the drive. Source is only needed if you are compiling on the machine. I compile on one machine and build a slackball to install it on the other machine. Now, install windows, just the default installation. windows xp takes almost 900 megs. Add office xp to it. That is another 400 megs. Look, we haven't installed any servers yet, and we are all the way up to 1.3 gigs. Just for kicks, lets install Visual Studio. Look, we just hit the 2 gig point. I haven't even installed basic burning apps, multimedia apps, or day to day software. size of an os with a gui and fully working system is determined by the user. But, it is possible to install a fully working system on 2 gigs or less with a *nix os.

Re: RTFA!

[Rimbo]

"Win32 app working under .NET? What do you mean working under .net? .NET is a managed environment, a JIT-ed world with bytecode, GC etc. (like Java)"

It's also the name of the latest API. The new stuff in .NET doesn't break the stuff (well, not completely) that's in Win32. Neither did MFC. Neither did ActiveX.

A better example is probably the successive versions of the DirectX API. At least here we don't have people getting confused because of the lack of a numbering scheme. ;)

Re: RTFA!

[Wolfrider]

--Try installing Knoppix to your HD, then go and delete the stuff you don't need. My install fits in under 2 gig (but you need 2300M to start with.) You *don't* need the sources except for the kernel.

Re: RTFA!

[Hooded One]

Aren't the majority of packages on Linux CDs third-party extras? Sure, Windows comes with some stuff by default, but nowhere near as much as Linux. A Linux install comparable to what Windows includes on its CD would almost certainly fit on one CD as well.

Re: RTFA!

[Minna Kirai]

Windows is so big, bloated and unstable because you have great binary compatibility. I can get Visicalc, one of the first spreadsheet programs for PCs, and run it under Windows XP.

That's insensible. The reason Visicalc works is because it's "statically linked". It doesn't depend on any external libraries to run. Statically linked Linux binaries will run on any Linux system (with the right CPU family). Dynamically linked Windows apps can easily get into "DLL hell". There are closed-source programs compiled for 2-year old versions of DirectX that no longer run on WindowsXP.

Linux developers don't usually like to release statically linked apps. They think it wastes space, and they're right. "Besides", the argument goes, "the needed libs are Free software, so you're allowed to obtain anything you need"

Damnit.

[fliplap]

Damnit, Project Opie developers are still talking about how many things are going to change when we move to QT3 (for example ensurevisable())

Me and my delusional business brain

[JasonUCF]

Son of a bitch. Am I the only one who read the topic and went 'Woah! Predictions for fiscal fourth quarter? Huh, I wonder what they'll come up with.'

yes, I know it's Slashdot, yes, I know we're geeks, but just for that moment, that hesitating, single moment , I thought.. Slashdot.. the Business site?! Aiyeeee!

New versions alway better in the long run

[jj00]

Now this is what I like about Linux; every time I think some annoying little thing about the interface/OS is really starting to annoy me, a new version comes out and something get tweaked to the way I like it.

It's really the reason I have grown to like Linux so much: I can actually see the progress of its development moving forward. It seems in the past few years that Windows has just been moving backwards.

Re:New versions alway better in the long run

[leifm]

Not backwards, just kind of sideways.

What I would like to see..

[ErisCalmsme]

Is more apps that require QT but not all of kde to run. That's why I use gtk apps... because most of them dont require gnome. There are gnome apps of course, and there are progs like Gaim that will give you a little somethin' extra if you have gnome installed, but you don't need it... Are there any qt apps that dont require kde to be installed?

Re:What I would like to see..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, some of the common ones include

Opera Web browser
LyX word processor
SuSE's YaST.
Scribus destkop publisher.
The Linux 2.6 QConf
Kylix.
YHBT Business books
and hundreds more.

Re:What I would like to see..

[AArmadillo]

There are many. One of the advantages of Qt is that it provides a common interface to X-Windows, MS Windows, and Mac OS GUI programming. Qt is entirely independent of KDE, the only reason an application would be bound to KDE is if it utilizes the KDE extensions to Qt.

Re:What I would like to see..

[ErisCalmsme]

I suppose I just have had bad luck then. Seems whenever I find something on freshmeat that requires qt, it also requires kde. I knew someone on slashdot would be able to clear that up for me ;)

Re:What I would like to see..

[_|()|\|]

I use gtk apps... because most of them dont require gnome.

Because GTK+ and GNOME are developed by a lot of the same people, there's a tendency to move things down a layer, where appropriate. For example, a lot of stock icons moved from GNOME to GTK+ between GNOME 1 and 2.

The relationship between Qt and KDE, as I see it, is less of a two-way street.

Re:What I would like to see..

[Ripat]

Yes there are many! Check out:
http://www.trolltech.com/freesoftware/index. html

xdu is a nice little gem i found recently.

Re:What I would like to see..

[be-fan]

WTF? He asked for Qt apps. Why are you listing GTK apps?

Re:What I would like to see..

[SoulDrift]

Also, I think it's the case that the only KDE package required by most apps is kdelibs.

So if you only want one particulay application, you only need the one KDE dependency to get it running, rather than having to install the whole thing.

Re:What I would like to see..

[arose]

I just wanted to shoe that if those are the best of QT only applications it's quite useless.

Re:What I would like to see..

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"One of the advantages of Qt is that it provides a common interface to X-Windows, MS Windows, and Mac OS GUI programming."

Thankfully, GTK+ also does this. Gaim/Win32 is proof of that. With the new Wimp skin, GTK+ even matches the Windows look, for the most part.

Of course, there are also QT apps that I enjoy on Windows. MySQLAdmin, for one.

Re:What I would like to see..

[be-fan]

Why would you want to do that? How is that relevent to his question?

Re:What I would like to see..

[arose]

How is this relevant to the question [why aren't there any more QT applications around?]?

The existing ones are not that good/unique to inspire others to use the toolkit.

Re:What I would like to see..

[edwdig]

GTK for Windows barely works. There are constantly bugs in it. Unless they fixed it recently, GAIM for Windows hasn't had working drag and drop for months due to GTK bugs.

Doing GTK development on Windows is extremely difficult. Thought it was hard getting all the dependencies right in Linux? Try doing it in Windows where you don't have a package manager to help set it up.

Re:What I would like to see..

[10Ghz]

The existing ones are not that good/unique to inspire others to use the toolkit.

The DudeWell... that's just like... your opinion man

gcc dynamic linking?

[4of12]

A couple of years ago someone on the KDE team posted a nice analysis of the performance bottlenecks associated with dynamic linking, C++, and gcc, particularly as regards Qt use.

So I have to wonder, with Qt 4, KDE 3, gcc 3.3, how many of the performance problems remain?

Re:gcc dynamic linking?

[IamTheRealMike]

That's what all the talk about reducing number of symbols and relocs is about - KDE got hit really really hard by the way it requiries lots of fixup at startup time in the linker. In some cases it was THE biggest drain on startup time. By reducing the number of symbols in the code, you reduce the work needed to dynamically link it all, so improving the speed.

Though, I can't help thinking that prelink is a better solution to that problem. But whatever, they are surely aware of that technology by now.

Re:This might mean something to me

[Bingo Foo]

Their licensing scheme doesn't "suck." It's just incompatible with your goals, i.e. a free toolkit which you can use to create salable apps. If you don't like it, you can:

1. Buy a Qt commercial developer license
2. Release your own apps as open source
3. Use a different toolkit

It sounds like you have chosen #3. I'm sure the people at Trolltech are able to sleep well regardless.

use of the standard library

[Eponymous Coward]

I'd like to see more use of the standard library. The traditional complaints of poorly conforming compilers is mostly just history. Except for support of the export keyword, most C++ compilers and standard library implementations are now quite good. Most platforms even have several excellent compiler / library combinations to choose from.

Even though it would be hell for already existing apps, I would love to see use of standard library components rather than the re-invented QT versions. And even in those cases were the QT versions have extra features, I still think the advantages of using a library that is already familliar with most C++ programmers outweighs the disadvantages. Of course, that's just IMHO.

ec

Re:use of the standard library

[Zugot]

When developing for multiple platforms, the so-called standard libraries may not be the same. Thats why I am glad that QT includes some of their own functions in the same way the GTK has GLIB.

Before you try to book a hotel room

[SlashCrunchPop]

I believe someone got the name of the town wrong, it's Nove Hrady and not Nove Hardy.

Re:Before you try to book a hotel room

[presroi]

Ooops. Sorry, I did not see your posting and said the same just on another thread.

Actually, there is some kind of accent on the e of Nove ( ) but the slashdot form does not accept this character.

Re:Before you try to book a hotel room

[presroi]

Argh, even that got filtered out.

"& e a c u t e ;" would be the right HTML code.

Anyway, I can't think of any reason for filtering them out in the comment section of /.

QT4

[SlayerDave]

I have recently spent a good deal of time programming with QT3. While QT is the best C++ GUI library and application framework, I think it needs some improvement. Here are my gripes, in no particular order.

First, the signal/slot mechanism really bugs me. I am annoyed with the need to use non-ANSI C++ techniques (e.g. public slots, moc) to achieve results that could easily be done with legal C++ code. While not strictly illegal, the use of the SIGNAL and SLOT macros, along with the Q_OBJECT macro, are not very good techniques. Specifically the reliance on macros to achieve basic GUI functionality violates a key principle in Meyers' "Effective C++", namely avoiding reliance on the preprocessor.

Second, several GUI widgets do not have a proper separation of data from view. I am thinking specifically of QTable and QListView. A better approach, from an OO design perspective, is the one taken in Java Swing. The JTable and JTree provide a nice mechanism for separating the data model from the GUI display. I find it obnoxious to have to subclass QTable and build-in data model methods to achieve results that would be cleaner under a Model-View design paradigm.

The QT online documentation is not easy to navigate. They should take a lesson from the Java API docs and reorganize the QT docs along those lines.

Re:QT4

[fault0]

> The QT online documentation is not easy to navigate. They should take a lesson from the Java API docs and reorganize the QT docs along those lines.

Wow, I've found the Java API docs extremely hard to navigate.

Perhaps that's because of the bloat (in terms of classes) of the Java API, though.

Re:QT4

[chowells]

> to achieve results that could easily be done with
> legal C++ code.

Well, that depends how you define "legal C++ code". Of course you could do it other ways. Some tool kits use virtual functions instead of slots and signals. You need to subclass continually. Not my idea of fun.

Personally I'm a huge fan of slots and signals and think that they work extremely nicely.

Re:QT4

[SlayerDave]

That's true, the Java API has a very large number of classes. But what I like about their docs is the use of frames, which is normally quite annoying, but is well-done in the case of JavaDoc. Also, you can select a particular package to view, such as javax.swing or java.util, which greatly limits the number of classes you have to browse. Also, I like the ability to see clearly what members are new in each class and what members are inherited and/or reimplemented. Also, getters and setters are listed together in the Java docs, but not in the QT docs. I think these features make the Java docs easier to navigate than the QT docs.

Re:QT4

[katz]

I find that the signal/slot mechanism an effective and elegant way to enhance C++'s dynamicness. In C++, as with Java, objects can only respond to messages if they or their ancestor classes respond to that message.

So say you have a C++ linked list class called "List"; you can't add any arbitrary object into the list--only objects which inherit from some basic ListElement type [1].

In Java, you can add seemingly arbitrary objects to vectors only because those objects inherit from a common Object class.

Java, C++, pascal -- That's the algol school of languages. Another school bases its OO philosophy on Simula67. Smalltalk, Objective-C, and Python's object models allow any object to respond to any message regardless of their base type (so in Python, I can add any object I want to lists) If the object is passed a message which it does not support, the runtime library or interpreter raises an exception.

QT's signals and slots mechanism extend C++'s dynamicness so that it can do the same thing as Smalltalk, Objective-C, and Python.

[1] templates are just compiler macros; they are complementary to a dynamic, polymorphic language (java is getting them, but so might in the near future). You still can't mix arbitrary types in a given instantiated template object.

---
aside: where can I get toilet paper imprinted with Microsoft source code?

Roey

Re:QT4

[SlayerDave]

It is matter of personal preference, to some degree. Personally, I prefer the EventListener mechanism in Java Swing to the signal/slot mechanism in QT. Of course, C++ does not support anonymous classes, but it does support inner classes with the same scoping (I think) as Java inner classes, so it would be relatively easy to write small Listener classes, registered with the appropriate widget, to handle callbacks and events. Again, personal preference.

I should admit, though, that my main annoyance with the Qt signal/slot mechanism is that it confuses Emacs, screwing up indentation and syntax highlighting. Annoying, but not enough to make me stop using QT.

Re:QT4

[fault0]

> Also, I like the ability to see clearly what members are new in each class

Yup, I'd love to see this done in Qt.. it's even marked in the source I beleive (@since 3.1, etc..)

> what members are inherited and/or reimplemented.

I think it already is

> Also, getters and setters are listed together in the Java docs,

agreed.

Re:QT4

[chowells]

Well plenty of KDE developers use emacs/xemacs so presumably with the emacs scripts things in kdesdk so presumably it is possible to get emacs sorted :)

Re:QT4

[TomorrowPlusX]

Let me tell you something about the model-view-controller seperation: it is the main reason swing and mac os x's cocoa are so damned slow for certain tasks. ( try dragging the vertical scroll-bar in the files pane in ProjectBuilder sometime... )

I emphasise "certain tasks" -- my own experence is more with cocoa than swing but I can say with absolute horror that NSOutlineView and NSTableView are dog slow, thanks to the model-view-controller seperation. QT's TableView and QListView, as much less abstract APIs, hauled ass.

I know this from experience, having ported quite a bit of my own code from Qt to Cocoa in the past 8 months. I've had to redesign parts of the app's frontend to get around the fact that keeping tabular data refreshed was consuming something like 75% CPU time. Whereas it was a non-issue under Qt.

I'm not complaining: Model-view-controller design is by and large a Good Thing, and frankly, programming NSTableView via delegates is a dream. But it comes with a price.

My recommendation is that if you dissaprove of the QTable and QListView concrete approach, write an abstract model mechanism to wrap it. It shouldn't constitute more than a few evenings' work.

Re:QT4

[Admiral Burrito]

That's true, the Java API has a very large number of classes. But what I like about their docs is the use of frames, which is normally quite annoying, but is well-done in the case of JavaDoc.

I find javadoc frames annoying. Easily fixed of course, just use the non-frames version.

My javadoc navigation solution is to create a folder on my mozilla personal toolbar with bookmarks for the packages and classes I refer to most often, and one for the package list (so I can reach the other packages). It's like a separate bookmarks button just for java API stuff. Works pretty well for me.

Re:QT4

[PSC]

First, the signal/slot mechanism really bugs me. I am annoyed with the need to use non-ANSI C++ techniques (e.g. public slots, moc) to achieve results that could easily be done with legal C++ code.

But it can't. C++ is notorious for its inspection features, or rather, lack thereof. C++ offers virtually no meta class information. That's the sole point of moc's existance.

(And not only Qt desparately needs meta classes. The ROOT framework also uses a meta class generator, here creferred to as a "dictionary generator", but doing the same thing moc does: build a meta class from a class.)

Specifically the reliance on macros to achieve basic GUI functionality violates a key principle in Meyers' "Effective C++"

You can't just use a mixin here - you had to inherit from a generated (by your much-hated moc!) class. That would not only pollute the name space but also make your program less readable.

Maybe it's best to think of moc as an aspect weaver that weaves in meta object information. This style of programming (AOP) is current research in Computer Science and going far beyond mere OOP techniques.

[...] not have a proper separation of data from view. I am thinking specifically of QTable and QListView.

I agree fully-hearted (esp. on your gripes about QTable). Then again, the article reads:

Model/view classes for list box, tree view, icon view and table

Sure sounds good to me!

Re:QT4

[Kidbro]

The QT online documentation is not easy to navigate. They should take a lesson from the Java API docs and reorganize the QT docs along those lines.

Read the doc in the QT Assistant, an application designed specifically for the task. You'll notice that soon you find your way around about as easily as you do with the online Java doc. Maybe not the optimal solution for you (it sure ain't for me), but it works.

Re:QT4

[Arandir]

First, the signal/slot mechanism really bugs me. I am annoyed with the need to use non-ANSI C++ techniques (e.g. public slots, moc) to achieve results that could easily be done with legal C++ code.

There is no ISO C++ mechanism that does the same thing that signals/slots do. None. None at all.

Now before you start talking about Boost::Signals, libsig++, gtkmm, etc., take a step back. Those things you're talking about are libraries, just the same as Qt. They are not standard mechanisms any more than gettext or libxml are standard mechanisms. Every bit of the code that is in Qt to implement signals/slots is standard ISO C++ code. No different than with Boost::Signals.

And as opposed to those other "standard" mechanisms, Qt signal/slots are extremely flexible.

The QT online documentation is not easy to navigate.

You have been smoking crack, haven't you? Despite it's unfamiliarity to those children raised on the Holy Bible of JavaDoc, the Qt documentation is a breath of fresh air when it comes to the dissemination of useful information. No other body of technical documentation anywhere in the Open Source world even comes close.

Re:QT4

[WWE-TicK]

> But it can't.

What about boost::signal?

Re:QT4

[WWE-TicK]

> Every bit of the code that is in Qt to
> implement signals/slots is standard ISO C++
> code. No different than with Boost::Signals

But Qt code uses non-standard keywords such as "public slots" and "signals". Code which uses these keywords need to be fed into a preprocessor which then converts that code into legal C++. The Comeau C++ compiler is a C++-to-C translator. Your argument is like saying any C++ code is perfectly legal ANSI C code; you just have to feed the C++ code into a "preprocessor" (such as Comeau's compiler) first before you actually compile it.

A signal/slot implementation like boost::signals, on the other hand, is ANSI C++ code.

Re:QT4

[be-fan]

I agree about the documentation (Qt's documentation rocks) but I have to disagree about the signals/slots. Qt relies on a preprocessor to achieve its signals/slots. That's different from Boost::Signals, which is built on actual language mechanisms. Qt signals was a good idea back when the template mechanism wasn't widely available, but its an anachronism today.

Re:QT4

[Arandir]

Do what I did, and perform some actual test. Write a quick sample program requiring callbacks. Implement one version in Boost::Signals, and the other in Qt. Statically link both. Now check the size of the binaries. Now check the complexity of the actual syntax used. Chain signals to signals. Connect a single signal to multiple slots. Connect multiple signals to a single slot. Finally, send a single to an independent third party object with modifying it or writing a wrapper.

Qt is much more flexible than Boost, it results in smaller sizes, and is easier to use.

Re:This might mean something to me

[arkanes]

Actually, if you want to develop on windows, #2 isn't even an option, which is something I'm sure limits uptake in some cases. But like you said, I'm sure they sleep okay regardless.

Re:Sanity Check

[joib]

Its slashdotted right now but IIRC it uses squishdot, a slashdot clone written on top of the zope application server.

I'm not so sure its a good idea.

[HanzoSan]

I agree with you exactly, it sounds nice but why do we need to change an architectual change when the current QT architecture is the best there is?

Why fix what isnt broken? Especially when you are ahead of the curve and on the cutting edge? Why not polish what you have? Thats the exact problem Gnome has, they keep restarting and redoing everything and they get NO WHERE.

KDE 4.0 would be better if it were based on the current QT because it could be polished, if they instead have to rewrite alot of code for a port, this is going to slow Linux on the desktop, and for what? A tiny bit more speed? I want to be sure that the benefits outway the cost here. The cost being time.

Re:I'm not so sure its a good idea.

[kdsolutions]

ANALOGY:

The US has the best power grid in the world.

What happened earlier this month?

Just because it's the best doesn't mean it shouldn't be improved!

Re:I'm not so sure its a good idea.

[BenjyD]

A 15% reduction in memory usage is a fairly major bit of 'polish' to add to an app. Kde 4.0 is a long way off anyway (3.2 is planned for december, so h). From the sound of it, the change 3->4 is not as big as the jump was 2->3.

Re:I'm not so sure its a good idea.

[pcb]

The US has the best power grid in the world

As mentioned before, NA does not have the best power grid in the world. In fact, many would argue that NA has the oldest and most unreliable power grid amongst the developed nations (most of Europe and Asia have much better systems). Refer to this article.

--PCB

Re:I'm not so sure its a good idea.

[kdsolutions]

again, that was based off a quote from a government official who'se name I'm too damned lazy to remember right now.

as well, did you read my reply to HanzoSan's reply to my post?

no! if you did, i wouldn'd be posting this reply to your reply because you would not have replied.

I'm not labling you as a troll, as you seemed to at least back up your stand. But at least read the other posts in response to my comment before you repeat the words of a troll.

Again, someone please kick my ass for once again feeding the troll who posted the first reply to my comment, as I'm sure he'll eat this right up as well.

no hard feelings, PCB, as you do raise a valid point and I do agree with it. But please look as what my comment was based off of and take a sec to figure out the point I was trying to make. You DID manage to take this post off-topic.

Re:I'm not so sure its a good idea.

[Wolfrider]

/me kicks your ass, as requested... Now stop feeding the troll. :b

Re:I'm not so sure its a good idea.

[kdsolutions]

/me gets back up and dusts off
Thank you, Wolfrider... it was so hard to resist trying to make him see the point which was (and I apologize for this) masked by a mis-informed analogy.

Re:This might mean something to me

[joib]

I think the logic goes something like: If you truly love RMS, you aren't using windows anyway.

Why turn KDE into Gnome?

[HanzoSan]

This is the exact problem Gnome has. They keep messing around under the hood and nothing changes from the user point of view, development is moving at turtle pace because developers who want to write gnome apps cant figure out what to use because some new bonobo/mono type thing comes out every 6 months.

Developers need stability if they are going to work on big projects, we need at least a few years before a big re-write. I cant develop for Gnome because everytime I try to start they change something.

Re:Why turn KDE into Gnome?

[Lispy]

This is not intended as trolling as the other answer someone gave, but why is it then that most apps I use on a daily basis are Gnome apps? I am not a programmer myself but if I compare KDE apps with the GTK based ones I must say that GNOME apps are mostly far superiour. Except for k3b maybe.

How would you explain this discrepancy?

Re:Why turn KDE into Gnome?

[IamTheRealMike]

I guess you'll be pleased to hear that GNOME 2 remains fully backwards compatible throughout the 2.x cycle - in the history of the project, it's broken compatability in a major way only once, compared to KDEs 2 times (though 2->3 was extremely trivial for 99% of apps).

Mono is entirely irrelevant - it's not related to the GNOME project other than having Miguel/Ximian involved, and you are certainly not forced to use it to write GNOME apps.

Basically, I think you're misinformed - if you write an app for GTK2/GNOME2, it will continue to work for quite a long time, until the next major revision (which is going to be needed simply in order to properly sync KDE and GNOME around standards eventually anyway). So, I don't know what you're complaining about really.....

Re:Canopy Group

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, Canopy Group isn't their parent company. The Canopy Group just owns 4% of TrollTech.

On the other hand, the Canopy Group owns 43% of SCO/Caldera (might have changed since dec. 2002 though)

Quit your Trolling.

Very nice. But they forgot one minor thing:

[master_p]

I don't have any major complain from Qt, as I have been using it a lot in our company and found out that it is the best.

I only have this problem: the TreeView widget is single-linked. This a major problem for us, since our apps contains lots of trees. We have to do a lot of tricks, like keeping a pointer to the last item all the time.

I've posted this on the Qt newsgroup but I was ignored. Although many people have complained about it, Qt engineers ignored us. I think they should fix it in version 4.

Other than that, Qt is indeed the finest toolkit out there. It simplifies development a lot, and it fills the great void that exists in C++ libraries. It's really like the Java libraries or the .NET libraries, providing almost everything needed under the sun.

The biggest advantage of it is that it works as expected; in other words, you just create one widget inside the other, and voila, there is the app's gui. You can even do it programmatically, without the KDesigner.

Finally, it does C++ justice. It's the only library that shows how powerful C++ can be. After having used Qt and Java, I may safely say its up on par with Java...even better I would say, since it uses all of C++ capabilities, including the most important one: templates.

Re:Very nice. But they forgot one minor thing:

[arkanes]

I use (and adore) wxWindows now, but one thing I always liked about Qt was that any widget could be it's own top-level frame - made testing custom widgets and the like much easier. Price tag was the kicker for me, but I've grown to prefer the wxWindows API anyway.

Re:Very nice. But they forgot one minor thing:

[gregfortune]

Then spend the time necessary and modify the QTreeView source directly, making it doubly linked. If it's really causing you that many problems, your time is well invested making the change. Also, may be able to get by with simply subclassing it. Seriously, the source is not that hard to understand and making changes to it is kind of fun :) I ended up digging around in the QRichText source so I had a better idea of how they handled the psuedo html...

Re:Very nice. But they forgot one minor thing:

[dknight]

No, the most important one (that java forgot) is the ability to resize arrays!

(ok, ok, sorry, but that was always something about Java that just bugged the hell outta me, and I know lots of my friends agree)

Re:Very nice. But they forgot one minor thing:

[ratfynk]

"Other than that, Qt is indeed the finest toolkit out there. It simplifies development a lot, and it fills the great void that exists in C++ libraries. It's really like the Java libraries or the .NET libraries, providing almost everything needed under the sun."

Very interesting it does not include everything according to Sun. What Sun needs to do with the MADHATTER is create a Java dev desktop. That would be interesting. KDE is great and yes you can is the Dev attitude. Why not have more than one desktop available under X for different purposes, a better desktop switch with a simple macro combo and holding multiple X sessions for a single user might become very usefull. For examble if the ram footprint of KDE was small enough you could keep a session suspended, and then switch into another desktop which is already up in ram. If the ram level swap out was say around 80 meg then having a ram partition for swapping desktops would be fantastic! Imagine 512 to one gig of ram and you could really smoke when building big java based web apps. Instead of having to switch out X sessions you could have more than one up at all times.

Re:Very nice. But they forgot one minor thing:

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than that, Qt is indeed the finest toolkit out there. It simplifies development a lot, and it fills the great void that exists in C++ libraries. It's really like the Java libraries or the .NET libraries, providing almost everything needed under the sun.

Except that it costs way more than the MS development tools or Java.

Trolltech ain't getting many developers because of their insane pricing. Not that I want it for free, just reasonable pricing.

Shame because it is a decent cross-platform kit.

Re:Very nice. But they forgot one minor thing:

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you and your friends need to stop drooling over stupid American muscle cars and get a clue -- java.util.Vector has been around forever, and java.util.ArrayList has been around since JDK 1.2.

Re:Very nice. But they forgot one minor thing:

[penguin7of9]

I think Java clearly does not meet the legal bar for being a good platform for open source development.

Hey, it's open source--you can just fix it. Oh, wait, development is run by Troll Tech. Well, you are a paying customers are you not? You don't even get a response from the company for your $$$?

Re:Very nice. But they forgot one minor thing:

[Jeremi]

Except that once you've changed the Qt source you're stuck with using that version of Qt forever -- or at least, every time you upgrade to a new version of Qt, you have to re-implement your changes into the new Qt release's QTreeView source. Not very much fun :^(

Re:Very nice. But they forgot one minor thing:

[Jeremi]

Doesn't matter what class I'm referring to... the point is valid for any code that is in someone else's codebase.

Re:Very nice. But they forgot one minor thing:

[gregfortune]

I would seriously doubt that a patch couldn't be created that would apply to new versions without too much hassle unless Trolltech made huge changes to the internal data structure/api and that probably won't happen very often with the list view source.

Re:Very nice. But they forgot one minor thing:

[swillden]

Except that it costs way more than the MS development tools... Shame because it is a decent cross-platform kit.

Yeah, Microsoft's cross-platform development kit is much cheaper.

Re:Very nice. But they forgot one minor thing:

[GreenBugsBunny]

Disclaimer: I'm using Redhat 9 as my reference here.

This can already be done with linux's virtual consoles (ctrl+alt+F1 - ctrl+alt+F12). F1-F6 are text consoles, but F7-F12 are graphics consoles.

When using The X login, you only have one X console by default on F7 (aka :0) To start another session on F8, open an Xterm and run 'X :1'. 'X :2' F9, 'X :3' is F10, etc. It works like you described, and you just have to use ctrl+alt+F* to switch. I'm sure there is a way to specify which WM you want to run, but I haven't messed with it.

This is a very handy feature, and I use it a lot at work for remote X sessions on different machines ('X :1 -query ' for example).

Re:Very nice. But they forgot one minor thing:

[ratfynk]

I dropped red hat because they do not document switchdesk very well. I am running Slack 9 the manager is xwmconfig the docs are not lacking but the gui is really simple. Patrick uses the solution that the default you can change in root and a /home user can change their own preference I just set this user profile back to Gnome. So when I ctrl-alt-bkspc and then just type startx again. If I create multiple users then I can set the root preference to no X and each of the users to a different desktop. However you have to switch user to go into a different session anyway. I will look to see if there is another way. What I was getting at is completely different, holding a supended X session in a ram partition with different scaled down purpose oriented desktops. It would be great if you could config a java/html developement only desktop! This advancement would leave the MS desktop model in the dust. The ability to do things with lots of ram and a ram partition rather than hd swaps or drop out of X and then back in is something that could easily be in the future, ram is cheap harddrives are a pain in the ass. Running a ram partition for swap is silly but sometimes it helps. Why not make the idea work for a really usefull purpose.

Exactly, Tell this to the Gnome development crew.

[HanzoSan]

Maybe they will quit with the architectual changes every few months and actually add features!

Re:This might mean something to me

[phurley]

I use and enjoy wxWindows, but I do not think your criticism of QT and their licensing is very fair. They have a completely free license (GPL) which you can use - to create completely free applications. They have commercial licensing (admittited too expensive for "shareware" type applications).

There is a completely reasonable middle ground where you can release your application as GPL code - which you can legally sell for any price you want - yes you need to provide the source code to your customers (not a bad thing) and yes they can then give it away to their friends, family and even people they pass on the street - but if your application has true value - they will probably be more than willing to pay for it (especially if it is as low cost as you claim). Many users are not sophisticated enough to compile their own binaries and the making the "official" binaries what you sell - is legal.

Now if you are just upset because they will not give you (or sell at the price you pick) their library for you to use in closed source for profit applications, then it is far better that you found a different library.

Re:To all the GTK zealots. (5core:5, insightful)

[molarmass192]

Nice flame, and you're wrong about GTK based applications NEVER being as popular as QT. Mozilla/Netscape, OpenOffice/StarOffice, GIMP, gAIM, MPlayer, and XMMS are ALL GTK apps. You'd have a hard time naming a single QT application (not desktop), with the exception of Opera, that rivals even one of these in terms of mind share.

For the valid part of your post, you're right, the current GTK file dialog does suck. There's a patch from Ximian floating around to change it to look like this which is better but still lacks some "coolness" like previews and filters. The threads I've seen all point to a rewrite planned for GTK 2.6 but backwards compatibility is a sticking point.

KDE loads faster than XP

[HanzoSan]

So I dont see why people complain about loadtimes when its faster than XP. Sure its slower than Afterstep or Fluxbox, maybe its slower than Gnome, but its also more powerful and more refined.

I dont care about speed issues, I can upgrade my CPU or my harddrive to SCSI, I do get angry when I have to learn a new API.

Re:This might mean something to me

[yamla]

You can use the outdated 2.3 non-commercial edition for Windows. Your development has to be non-commercial (not just open-source), of course.

Re:This might mean something to me

[pclminion]

I think you miss his point. Maybe he means he's willing to pay for a commercial license, but his product is small enough that he would rather pay a lower license fee. A reasonable demand, although Trolltech obviously will do what they will...

A few years ago back when QT 2.0 just came out, I downloaded the free trial for Windows, and marveled at the fact that my program which was originally written for Linux "just worked." I wanted to create a particular Windows app at the time, and distribute it as Open Source.

So I emailed Trolltech and asked, "I wanted to create an open source Windows app. You already have a free license for open source apps on X, why can't I create one for Windows too?"

The response was, "Why on earth would anyone create a free Windows application?"

Hence, no cheap Windows licenses.

Re:Fork!!!!

[DrRiffic]

oh boy, another bannable catchphrase from SA that migrated to fark and finally caught on at slashdot only to be overused until forever

Re:To all the GTK zealots. (5core:5, insightful)

[fault0]

"The threads I've seen all point to a rewrite planned for GTK 2.6 but backwards compatibility is a sticking point."

I wonder why they just didn't do it for gtk 2.0, since it broke so much compatability anyways. I've seen threads before gtk 2.0 came out saying that it would have a new file dialog, then threads saying that gtk 2.2 would have a new file dialog, then threads saying gtk 2.4 would have a new file dialog, and now threads saying gtk 2.6 will have a new file dialog.

Oh yeah, there was even discussion before gtk 1.2 about a new file dialog :-)

I won't beleive it until gtk 3.0 :)

Re:It Sounds Nice (OT)

[cymen]

Do you know how to save your Gnome preferences? While running KDE I can load up the Gnome preferences panels but the changes are never saved. By default, my Gnome apps have large fonts, large UI widgets, and just look 'orrible.

Re:To all the GTK zealots. (5core:5, insightful)

[ElGuapoGolf]

Well, k3b seems to be one of the more popular cd burning programs around and is gaining a lot of mindshare.

I used to use xcdroast exclusively. But once I started playing with k3b, it's been impossible to go back. Feature wise it approaches some of the windows cd burning programs, which is no easy task.

Isn't xine more popular than MPlayer, and doesn't xine use their own toolkit, and not GTK? Gaim is great, but isn't there a qtopia version of it? Will a QT version be far beind?

Haven't they been talking about fixing the GTK file dialog for years now?

use of macros in C++

[jdooley]

While I haven't read the above-mentioned book, "Effective C++", I have been forced to make
the transition from C to C++ (at my University).
Having a C background makes me see macros as one
obvious solution to a problem, while they don't
even teach macros in my C++ programming classes.
Even talking to friends that program in C++ w/o
starting out in C, it seems like C++ programmers
are afraid of the preprocessor. Why is this?
I'm not trying to be critical, I am genuinely curious as to why C++ programmers avoid macros and other preprocessor directives at all costs. Anyone have an explanation?

Re:use of macros in C++

[js290]

Ever tried stepping through code with a debugger that's full of macros? Not fun, unless you like printf's. As far as Troll Tech using macros for their signal/slots, I don't care as someone using their toolkit. One less abstraction to worry about.

Hahahaa no we didnt

[HanzoSan]

Japan has a better powergrid than ours. Who gave you the idea that we had the best in the world? DO not assume our system is the best just because we are the USA. Japan has alot of things better than us, as does Korea. Japan has the best power grid in the world, the most efficient public transportation in the world, the best cellphone technology in the world. They also have better robotics than us,

South Korea is the most wired country in the world, with the best internet technology in the world.

just because its USA does not automatically equal best.

Re:Hahahaa no we didnt

[kdsolutions]

forgive my lack of research and trusing in my government officials upon stating that although it is the best in the world, it should have been inproved years ago, and since it was no, it failed massively.

by many, it is viewed to be the best in how it handles changes in demand and the speed with which repairs can be made when needed.

My point was, however, not that the US has the best of everything. Nobody has the best of everything. It is a fact that the US power grid is viewed by many to be the best in the world for the above-mentioned reasons.

Yes, it can be improved. As well it should. That was the point I was trying to make.

Somebody please kick my ass for further feeding this troll.

GTK - nyed!

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

Most of the applicatons you presented as GTK apps do not use GTK widgets:

Openoffice/Staroffice does not use GTK at all (in fact the first SO port to Linux was done by Matthias Kalle Dallheimer, a KDE founder...)

Mplayer has an optional GTK gui, which is hardly used by anyone. It also has at least two KDE guis. Not a very good GTK app.

XMMS has it's own GUI, GTK is basically used for the file dialog, which is arguably not the most impressive part of GTK.

Mozilla/Netscape uses XUL, it's own toolkit, again no GTK widgets are used, just some basic drawing routines.

This leaves GIMP (functional, but ugly) and GAIM (never used it, AOL is not my thing) for GTK.

Re:GTK - nyed!

[fodder69]

And even XMMS had to hack the file dialog to create a usable directory tree interface (I know cause I borrowed it for GRio500)....

Re:GTK - nyed!

[tempest303]

Your rebuttle needs a rebuttle.

OpenOffice: I'd hardly call the OO.o KPart a "port" :P Come back to me when you show me a full OO.o Writer window that uses native Qt widgets.

Mplayer is skanky. All the cool kids use Totem anyhow, which has an extremely capable Xine backend. :)

XMMS is equally skanky. RhythmBox totally owns its sorry ass.

Mozilla* - another crusty, crufty, nasty app. Epiphany and Galeon are far better browsers, but with Gecko's rendering power.

*(I mean Mozilla-proper here - Firebird is very nice, though Epiphany and Galeon are still better, IMHO)

As for Gaim, it does more than just AOL - Gaim speaks AIM, ICQ, MSN, IRC, Yahoo, Jabber, and even some weirdo protocols like Gadu-Gadu and Zephyr. It's even cross-platform!

You're forgetting a bunch of other good GTK apps, too:

Evolution, gThumb, GnomeMeeting, Sound Juicer, Camorama, and more.

Both GTK and Qt camps have great apps on their side - this bickering is stupid, especially when one can run apps from one environment inside the other just fine. (Especially thanks to freedesktop.org! Wahoo!)

How about more standard C++

[Ed Avis]

Is it too much to ask that the next Qt will use the standard C++ string class instead of its own reinvention and kitchen-sink-itis that it suffers from at the moment?

Re:How about more standard C++

[Carewolf]

Is it too much to ask that the next C++ will use the standard C string type instead of its own reinvention and kitchen-sink-itis that it suffers from at the moment?

Re:How about more standard C++

[Ed Avis]

Now come on, you're as well aware as I am of the problems with the standard C char* strings. Making a new string class is certainly justified if all you have to work with is something as error-prone as null-terminated character pointers. (And you may argue that char*s are entirely safe to work with, and only stupid programmers make mistakes; but I am a stupid programmer and judging by bugtraq, so are most others. Even assuming perfect programmers who don't mind doing memory allocation manually, a C-style string cannot store data containing embedded zero bytes.)

Back in 1993 or whenever, it was entirely reasoable for Qt and other C++ libraries - heck, even C libraries - to define their own string classes. I don't think that applies now - it's unlikely that Qt's string has any strong enough advantage over the standard string to make it worth introducing Yet Another String Class.

Replacing a type with something demonstrably better is fine. Pointlessly reinventing the wheel is not.

Re:How about more standard C++

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, to be honest, the QString class is substantially more powerful than the C++ string class. Most especially in casting to and from other data types. Moreover, it supports the full range of internationalised characters, it automatically casts as neede and passes by value as needed as well.

On the whole, it acts in a more intitive manner for the programmer, and that is true of almost all QT classes. That's the thing about QT, it works the way programmers want it to work. Say what you like about the licencing or the people or whatever, but it is a great toolkit to code with.

Re:How about more standard C++

[Ed Avis]

Well, to be honest, the QString class is substantially more powerful than the C++ string class. Most especially in casting to and from other data types.

boost::lexical_cast

Well, okay, I'm proposing a third party library to provide what Qt's string class has built-in. But in a way this illustrates an advantage of using the standard string (or other standard classes) rather than rolling your own. You are able to take advantage of lots of third-party code, including the excellent work at boost.org.

Moreover, it supports the full range of internationalised characters,

You can make a basic_string of whatever character type you wish, including wchar_t. I guess it's unfortunate that the standard 'string' is an alias for basic_string<char, ...> instead of using 16-bit or 32-bit characters, but it's not a disadvantage of the string class itself.

it automatically casts as neede and passes by value as needed as well.

The standard C++ string has value semantics, so you can pass it by value (and usually do so efficiently). In this respect it's just like an int - you can pass and return strings by value, and two strings are equal iff they have the same characters.

I'm sure the Qt string class is great, the question is, is it so much more wonderful that it justifies being different from the rest of the world?

Re:How about more standard C++

[Jeremi]

Is the STL string class still not thread-safe due to its reference-counting implementation? As I recall, that was (and maybe still is) a good reason to not use it.

Re:How about more standard C++

[Ed Avis]

AFAIK the standard library specification doesn't make any guarantees about thread safety (a big deficiency, I agree), so your question is really one about implementations. As far as I know most newer std::string implementations do not use reference counting because it's difficult to make it thread-safe.

I'd agree that if you have real performance or thread-safety requirements that block you from using std::string (even if you make some assumptions about the implementation), then you could be justified in rolling your own. But even then the sensible thing to do would be to make the interface as close to std::string as reasonably possible (perhaps omitting the direct character writing with operator[], since this makes copy-on-write difficult).

Re:How about more standard C++

[nrublimk]

Given what I think of the standard string class, i sure as hell hope not!!!!! The Standard (Template) library, while very flexible, seems needlesly complex (although various MS APIs still have them beaten there!)..

Re:How about more standard C++

[Ed Avis]

You may be right about the STL being complex, but the standard string class doesn't in fact come from the STL - it was added because of the need for a standard string to unify all the incompatible QString, CString, MyString etc etc etc that were common in the mid-90s.

Personally I think that the problem with the STL is that it is far too simple (in some ways) and this makes it complex to use. For example, std::map lacks any way to iterate over the keys of the map. Instead you can get an iterator over key, value pairs. From the viewpoint of designing a minimal interface this makes sense - a separate keys_begin(), keys_end() sequence would be redundant when you can already iterate over everything. But it would be a handy shortcut.

Re:How about more standard C++

[TheSunborn]

It is not, but why would you ever want a threadsafe string?

Re:How about more standard C++

[Jeremi]

So that you can use strings in a multithreaded program without random crashes? (and no, just making sure access to any given string object is serialized isn't enough, because multiple strings objects can point to the same ref-counted data)

Re:This might mean something to me

[Dan Stephans II]

Trolltech, sister company to SCO in the Canopy Group's myriad collection of companies...

Who's wanting?

[roystgnr]

It will take time for developers to start supporting the new format, which will leave end users wanting.

I expect I'll just do the same thing with qt4 that I did with qt3 (and gtk 2, etc.): install it, but keep older versions around until all the programs which use the library have been updated. This is the way libraries are supposed to work; you increment the major version when you've broken binary compatibility, you keep all the major versions installed that you need, and you uninstall them when you no longer need them.

Not exactly necessary...

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

Just start e.g. kmoon or klipper. KDE and GNOME use the same docking protocol, so any existing docked program would suffice.

AC Comment from other Canopy Employee

[bstadil]

Since my comment has been modded a Troll I think you should read this posting from another Canopy Company employee.

Quote:

As an employee of a company in the same office buildings as SCO and partly funded by Canopy Group, I strongly encourage a boycott of all companies funded by the Canopy Group.

There was a lot of buzz about mergers a few weeks ago. It seemed that everyone was going to join into one large company called, you know it: SCO! .......

Re:AC Comment from other Canopy Employee

[be-fan]

That would make no sense. Why would TT is an employee owned company. The employees would have to approve any merger. Why the hell would they merge with a sinking ship (SCO) for a measly 5.7% stake? Hell, a lot of companies that Canopy group invests in have absolutely no relation to SCO. They invest in a company (LinuxNetworx) that builds Linux-based clusters! You think they're going to make LLNL (one of their customers) pay a $700 Linux license fee for each node they build???

HTML rendering

[jamesk]

When can we expect a stand alone HTML rendering engine properly wrapped (and supported) by QT. Yes I know they have a rich text widget that supports simple HTML rendering BUT I have a project that needs something more sophisticated. Is there a KHTML or Gecko wrap out there that would give me x-platform across Linux, Windows and the Mac for use with stand alone QT applications???

Re:HTML rendering

[julesh]

Have you looked at this to solve your windows portability needs?

http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/

It uses cygwin, which might mean some user confusion with filenames; if that's an issue for you you might want to forget about it. Also it'll mean you're stuck with GPL. Otherwise, I understand the results are quite impressive... if you don't want to use X, you can probably substitute the windows version of Qt, and everything should work OK. It'll be a lot of work to get it going, but after that it should be stable and usable...

Re:This might mean something to me

[vurian]

I you cannot affort to invest a measly $1500 in your business, you're sunk anyway. You don't have a business, you have a hobby.

Re:This might mean something to me

[Cthefuture]

As others have mentioned, the problem isn't that we don't want to pay for a license.

I have no problem paying for QT.

I have a MSDN subscription in fact. That MSDN (Professional) was around $1000. Not too bad considering you get every single MS OS and the whole development environment (C/C++, C#, Java, VB, etc.) and all sorts of other bits. For the most part Microsoft is very good to their developers (hey, they make them money).

Compare that with QT which is around $3000+ for all three platforms (or what, $1500 for one platform?!). And it's only a GUI toolkit (sure, with some extra "fluff"). Way, way too expensive for what it does. If QT was $1000 for all three platforms, then I'd own several copies And many, many other people feel the same way. Their license prices are holding them back. They would have so, so many more developers working in QT if their prices were reasonable. That would only help them in the end as I have a strong feeling the world would become more QT-centric (I mean, it is a pretty good GUI toolkit; although the current stuff is rather slow).

Backwards compatibility is important

[ZorinLynx]

Sigh. I really hate to say this, but I must agree with keeping API's backwards compatible across versions of libraries.

I've been using Linux for years now, and one of the biggest annoyances is that software packages tend to be tied very closely to a specific version of a library. Without backwards compatibility, you sometimes need to have two or three different versions of the same library installed in order to use different applications.

When a library is used by a wide variety of applications, like Qt, GTK, libc, and so on, backwards compatibility should be ensured. Yes, this means the library may be a bit more bloated than it has to be, but the bloat isn't as bad as the bloat that results from having to install an ancient version of Qt in order to run an app that hasn't had active development for a few years.

This is coming from someone who doesn't do much software development; I just maintain a lot of systems and software libraries.

Re:Backwards compatibility is important

[be-fan]

Look at it this way. If library v2.0 is so much better than library v1.0, most of that code is going to be redundent. Adding all the features of library v2.0 while still keeping compatibility with library v1.0 means that you'll get almost the same memory usage as having both 2.0 and 1.0 installed at the same time. At least with the split-up version, the users have the choice of only keeping the apps that use a particular version of the library.

Re:Backwards compatibility is important

[gaelicwizard]

One of the things that some people have done in their libraries is to make the lib check what version the linked app thinks it should be, and then provide the API from that version, either with current code or with included older code. Something like this in some widely used libraries would bloat a libraries disk space, but not how it performs in memory b/c it would only make available the code for the version that is being used. Does this make sense or am I speaking out of my rectum?

JP

Re:Backwards compatibility is important

[jfx32]

It is possible to have both libraries on the same system. Suse did this during the move from kde2 - kde3. They had a package(kde-compat, or something like that) so you could continue to use kde2 binaries under kde3.

Re:It Sounds Nice (OT)

[edbarrett]

KDE is overriding your GTK preferences. Look in the KDE control center under Look&Feel/Style and deselect Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps, and then get rid of ~/.gtkrc-kde.

Moderators Suck ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll? Come on guys, we're not bashing Apple.
You don't have to throw a hissy fit cuz someone's bashing your fave tool.

from http://www.pclinuxonline.com/modules.php?mop=modlo ad&name=Forums&file=viewtopic&topic=870&forum= 37
As an employee of a company in the same office buildings as SCO and partly funded by Canopy Group, I strongly encourage a boycott of all companies funded by the Canopy Group.

Taking money from Ralph Yarrow (Canopy) made all of us sick to our stomachs but we held our noses and moved into their offices in the hope their stake would stay small. And we were out of business if we didn't.

There was a lot of buzz about mergers a few weeks ago. It seemed that everyone was going to join into one large company called, you know it: SCO! That buzz ended yesterday. Now the talk, all over the group, is how to distance ourselves from SCO and Canopy. The mention of our company on Slashdot resulted in very negative feedback and two potential customers walking away. Other's got it even worse. I hear Trolltech spent most of the day on the phone smoothing things over with their customers. Upper management meetings were held all afternoon among the group's companies (I'm not privvy to those, but can guess the subject matter). Companies that were considering a merger with SCO (some as close as 5 days away) are now backpedalling as fast as they can.

Canopy Group is the key to pressuring SCO. Thats where they get their money and their actions could harm the whole group and Canopy's plans. Pressure on the Canopy Group's members will result in pressure on SCO.

Save me from SCO! Boycott Canopy Group. If they want to point a gun at their own head, I'd rather they do it away from me. Write letters to the all the Canopy Group companies. We are all very small and even a few letters would have a major effect. The three we received yesterday sent management into a tizzy. Oh, yeah. And start at the bottom of the alphabetical list of companies, please.

Thanks for listening...

-------- more --------------

Ignoring your personal attacks, the point remains that the pressure point here is Canopy and their group members. SCO could care less about a boycott, Canopy will continue to funnel money to them. The key is Canopy and Canopy is vulnerable through their holdings.
Ralph Yarrow cares about only one thing: the bottom line.

Only three emails to my company convinced mangement that there was a problem. They spent most of the afternoon in closed door meetings deciding on how best to distance themselves from this mess (at least that was the discussion when I was called into offer my opinions). They dreamed of the day we would be slashdotted, but are very dismayed that when it finally happened, it was entirely negative and harmful. From my colleagues in other companies, I gather the scene was common all over the office park yesterday. A couple hundred more emails will have a dramatic impact. The pressure will proceed directly from companies of the Canopy Group up to Ralph. When he sees the bottom line being attacked he will rein in SCO.

Some have said that it is unfair to punish the other companies. But the other companies are already being punished for SCO's actions. We have already lost potential customers who informed us they did not want to be associated with Canopy/SCO in any way. My product's release date has been placed on hold indefinitely while this uproar is going on. I fear this nonsense will ruin us. It would be foolish to start the rollout under this dark cloud.

The party line from SCO is that the opposition is from just a few disgruntled 'pot-smoking hippie-types' that can be ignored and they will go away. (From an overheard conversation in the restrooms. No doubt, Monday morning SCO employees will receive news of a new policy about talking in the restroom. But it wasn't the employees forgetting to check the stalls before tossing around disparaging remarks).

Give them a reason to

Re:To all the GTK zealots. (5core:5, insightful)

[julesh]

There's a patch from Ximian floating around to change it to look like this which is better but still lacks some "coolness" like previews and filters.

Well, its certainly a start. But it still looks (& I suspect feels) very much like the same file dialogs that I was using 10 years ago.

Lets face it, the separate directory and file list should have been consigned to the scrapheap of history long ago. Using icons to distinguish files and directories in the same listing is just neater.

The control at the top (presumably for moving up through the directory structure) still looks clunky and unweildly, just like the original one I saw when I first used GIMP back when 1.0.0 was released. Personally, I blame Motif.

The buttons on the left look out of place (although so do the icons that provide equivalent functionality in KDE2; I haven't upgraded to v3 yet so can't comment on that). Quite usable, though, I suspect.

Yep, I'm still going to stear clear of GTK apps whenever possible, even if that patch gets applied. Thanks for reminding me why.

Re:Haha

[oscast]

it sucks? Its the best media container format available...

KDE Conference Talk Writeups

[JRiddell]

Writeups of the talks I went to are at:

the Nove Hrady wiki.

Re:Haha

[Kenterlogic]

Sure, the technology assosiated with QuickTime 6 (AAC particularly) is killer. The app itself is fundamentally flawed in the way it is presented. Usability and features are where it lacks. It is also slow as death.

change and "innovation"

[penguin7of9]

Many people have come to Linux because they want to get off the upgrade treadmill that commercial companies are subjecting them to. Commercial companies have all sorts of incentives for breaking backwards compatibility, like being able to sell new licenses.

Of course, the dual-license for Qt means that Troll Tech has most of the same incentives: they need to come out with new and "improved" versions in order to make their paying customers happy. And that's perhaps why dual-licensed software is not such a good idea for open source development after all.

Because, when all is said and done, there is really little that is innovative in any of Gtk+, Qt, wxWindows, FLTK, etc. They just are making different tradeoffs for different markets. And if any of them need a significant and incompatible API overhaul, it's probably because their developers were learning on the job. OO GUI toolkits have been around since the 1970's, and there really isn't a lot of new stuff to figure out about them.

Re:To all the GTK zealots. (5core:5, insightful)

[molarmass192]

My bad, it isn't, I based my post on "grep -ri gtk /usr/local" and it hit on a couple of unrelated files in OO. How about "the letters GTK appear in sequence in several OO files" instead?

Re:To all the GTK zealots. (5core:5, insightful)

[molarmass192]

I pretty sure they're referring to this one .

Re:I use linux but IANALH (I am not a linux hacker

[Lispy]

Maybe, but more likely the preemptive patch in kernel 2.6 will. ;-)

Would be a good Ask Slashdot..

[msimm]

As much attention (and general discussion) as the desktop is getting I'd love to see a couple of 'Ask Slashdot's' with people like Matthias.

I can think of a few questions I'd love to ask.

Qt 4 vs Qt 6

[egommer]

I don't know why you all are worried about QuickTime 4 f. I personally use QuickTime 6 on my iMac. Sheesh. You can't even see the latest pron and movie trailer's with Qt 4. Oh Wait... I think this is somthing else.. Damn you! you- 133t linux users fooled me again.

QT 4?

[Have Blue]

That's old news, man. QT4 has been out for years. We're up to QT6.3 now, and I can't wait for the next version with Pixlet...

Relax. If you don't like Qt4, use Qt3

[ishmalius]

It's not as though they're going to discontinue it!

Don't stress over this. Take your Ritalin.

Mod was correct

[kupci]

Save me from SCO!Huh? Save yourself.

I'd rate this as a troll, or maybe hypocritical. The writer calls for folks to boycott TrollTech, yet works for a company supported by Canopy/SCO, in a building with SCO?

Right...

Here's a better idea: kick in the funding to match whatever Canopy provides TrollTech, they do sell licenses...or does the tune change when it comes down to actual dollars and cents?

Re:To all the GTK zealots. (5core:5, insightful)

[molarmass192]

K3B is nice, but I have no clue about it's mindshare.

I did try xcdroast a while back (not overly impressive) but I still prefer to use the command line for cdrecord and prodvd.

I don't know. I looked at XINE a few years ago and wasn't impressed. However, I just took a peek, prompted by your post, and it looks like they've merged in a lot of the features from Ogle and MPlayer so I'm going to be taking it for another test drive very soon.

gAIM is awesome. The protocol implementations are not GTK specific and do most of the hard stuff, so anything is possible.

Yeah, I think the patch in question finally got rolled into CVS, not 100% sure though. However, it's primarily cosmetic and doesn't add any new functionality so in that sense it's not "fixed". of my post

Wrong...

[Dr. Evil]

Commercial development...

QT is a library. That's why the LGPL was written and that's why Gtk is LGPL'd. By GPL'ing the library, Troll Tech ensures that no product can be written for the library unless it too is under the GPL. The only way for a corporation to get out from under that bind is to pay Troll Tech. That's the point, and that's how Troll Tech makes their money.

Unfortunately there is nothing to protect non-GPL (or non-QPL) development under QT and thus KDE.

Re:Wrong...

[bongoras]

No, that's MY point. Free as in freedom means commercial developers are free to develop ANYTHING they want, as long as they are willing to give their customers the same freedoms they got.

Oh, you mean, commercial developers ought to be able to take the work that TrollTech did and create non-free stuff out of it, sell it, forbid their customers from reverse-engineering, modifying, or distributing the results, and NOT pay TrollTech for their efforts?

Sorry. The GPL exists precisely to prevent that sort of thing.

Re:Wrong...

[Dr. Evil]

"...NOT pay TrollTech for their efforts?"

It's tough to pitch free software when the first thing management sees is a $2000/developer price tag with no guarantee that it will remain under that price or scheme in the future.

Second, QT is one small component of a Linux or Unix environment. It is sad that the kernel, compiler, libraries, GUI and desktop environment could all be freely contributed, whereas the toolkit for the desktop environment would slap a tariff on the end for commercial development.

This is not what the GPL was for, this was a very clever use of the GPL to appease the strict Free Software developers, while still keeping commercial control over the toolkit.

Re:Wrong...

[manyoso]

Wrong... yourself. Its called the KDE/FreeQt foundation. Why don't you educate yourself before you open your mouth.

Re:Wrong...

[Dr. Evil]

Ummm... I don't think you're trolling, so I'll respond...

The KDE/FreeQt foundation never had anything to do with commercial interests. It existed because KDE was built on Qt which was built on the FreeQt license. The FreeQt license said roughly: "you cannot modify and distribute this code". If Troll Tech went bankrupt, was bought out, or neglected the code, KDE would be in trouble. So the KDE/FreeQT foundation was formed to protect KDE.

http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation .php

This all happened years ago. The KDE/FreeQT foundation is a historical artifact from the old FreeQt license which was eventually superceded by the QPL and GPL.

Re:Wrong...

[10Ghz]

It's tough to pitch free software when the first thing management sees is a $2000/developer price tag with no guarantee that it will remain under that price or scheme in the future.

To my knowledge, price of Qt is not that high when compared to alternatives. And are there any guarantees that the price of other toolkits remain stable? There aren't really.

Re:Wrong...

[Dr. Evil]

The absolute success of KDE means that Troll tech will have a monopoly over commercial entrance to the Linux Desktop. Given that, why should anyone want KDE to become a standard desktop?

Yes, I recognize that other toolkits can interact with the KDE environment, but if you need to use other toolkits or explain why Troll tech can exact a fee, why even support KDE as a standard desktop?

It's not the money itself, it's the long and complex explanation as to why purchasing would have to be enaged to develop for a "free" software platform, and the fact that you can't develop closed commercial software for KDE without paying it. Every Linux distributor would have to explain it, every new Linux customer would have to understand it, and every closed commercial developer would have to deal with it.

Win32 doesn't even have this problem, and Gtk certainly doesn't have this problem.

Re:Wrong...

[10Ghz]

The absolute success of KDE means that Troll tech will have a monopoly over commercial entrance to the Linux Desktop. Given that, why should anyone want KDE to become a standard desktop?

Because KDE is superior to the alternatives? And if you write free software, you don't need to pay one dime. I fail to see the problem. And if TT starts to abuse it's power, users would migrate to other toolkits.

Yes, I recognize that other toolkits can interact with the KDE environment, but if you need to use other toolkits or explain why Troll tech can exact a fee, why even support KDE as a standard desktop?

If you can't recoup the cost of Qt-license, then you should REALLY reconsider your desision to write closed, commercial software, since there obviously isn't that much demand for it.

It's not the money itself, it's the long and complex explanation as to why purchasing would have to be enaged to develop for a "free" software platform

If you write free software you don't have to pay. If you want to write closed software, you have to pay. I fail to see the problem. WHy should you get the right to write closed software but you want to deny TT the same right? If you use their tools for profit, you need to pay them, IMO that is fair.

Win32 doesn't even have this problem, and Gtk certainly doesn't have this problem.

Then use Win32 or your precious Gtk, I fail to see the problem.

Re:Wrong...

[Dr. Evil]

WHy should you get the right to write closed software but you want to deny TT the same right?

This is such bizzare logic. TT has thrown a toll to write commercial software for an open platform. The platform without TT was open. TT is writing a library, not applications. TT is denying the ability to write all (closed) commercial software for KDE without going through them. There is a big difference between me writing a closed application and TT writing a core toolkit for a desktop environment used on an open platform.

Whether or not you perceive it as a problem, it certainly represents a different set of freedoms when developing under KDE than when developing under the rest of Linux.

I agree with you in so far as to say that if you believe in strict open-source development, and don't care about commercial acceptance, then yes, it's not a big deal.

Re:Wrong...

[10Ghz]

This is such bizzare logic. TT has thrown a toll to write commercial software for an open platform. The platform without TT was open. TT is writing a library, not applications. TT is denying the ability to write all (closed) commercial software for KDE without going through them.

What's stopping you from using some other toolkit for your app? Gtk-apps work just fine in KDE. And TT is doing the exact same thing you want to do: to make money. What gives you the right to write software for profit, but TT can't do the same? To me that smells like hypocrisy.

And if you are serious about your proprietary software, the cost of Qt should not be a problem. But I fail to see what right do you have to profit from the work of TT. TT encourages you to write free software. If you choose not to do so, you have to pay them. That is, like I said, fair.

Whether or not you perceive it as a problem, it certainly represents a different set of freedoms when developing under KDE than when developing under the rest of Linux.

Then develop for Gnome and stop your whining. Problem solved. Nobody is forcing you to develop for KDE or use Qt for that matter.

I agree with you in so far as to say that if you believe in strict open-source development, and don't care about commercial acceptance, then yes, it's not a big deal.

Now I'm not a big and important software-developer, but it seems to me that commercial software is usually written by companies. And companies can easily afford the license of Qt. If they can't, I would seriously question their viability.

Tell me one good reason why TT should provide you with tools that you could exploit for profit without giving them a dime? that would basically kill their business, and it might kill Qt as well. To me, your desire to exploit work of others for free sounds extremely selfish. You want free tools, yet you don't want to give anything back. With Qt you get what's coming to you. You write free software, you get Qt for free. You write proprietary, commercial software, you have to pay. Like I said, I REALLY fail to see the problem here.

Re:Wrong...

[Dr. Evil]

Like I said, I REALLY fail to see the problem here.

That's right, you fail to see the problem.

Re:Wrong...

[10Ghz]

Well, I do see one problem. I see someone who expects others to give him the tools for free while he himself gives nothing in return.

Re:Wrong...

[Dr. Evil]

Oh no, it's worse than that.

TT expects the GNU/Linux environment to be given to them for free, and a desktop environment to be written on top of their toolkit for free, and they expect to charge money to all commercial (closed source) software developers who use their toolkit to target the desktop environment which they didn't develop.

All they have to do in exchange is to expand thier mindshare by giving their toolkit away to people who wouldn't pay for it anyways.

They're not evil for it either, they didn't seek out the arrangement. KDE set it all up.

I'd rather see Linux standardize on a Gnome environment, polish up the Gnome/KDE interactions, and leave KDE/Qt as an optional development path for whomever prefers it. That would leave TT in a profitable situation, but without enough power over commercial desktop development to be able to abuse it.

Re:Wrong...

[10Ghz]

TT expects the GNU/Linux environment to be given to them for free

Maybe, and in return they give Linux-community a free (both as in speech and as in beer) toolkit. Again, where is the problem?

and they expect to charge money to all commercial (closed source) software developers who use their toolkit to target the desktop environment which they didn't develop.

They didn't develop the desktop-environment, but they did develop the toolkit those developers are using. Why shouldn't they charge for it? And, like I said, if you write free software, you get the toolkit for free. if you want to profit from it, you have to pay.

I'd rather see Linux standardize on a Gnome environment

Ah, a Gnome-user. That explains your whining. You know what, you keep on developing for Gnome/GTK, no-one is forcing you to use Qt/KDE.

That would leave TT in a profitable situation, but without enough power over commercial desktop development to be able to abuse it.

What makes you think that they would abuse it, whereas Gnome/Gtk-guys would not? I mean, Qt is under the GPL, it's pretty difficult to abuse it. If TT starts to act like an ass, last GPL'ed version of Qt is re-licensed under the BSD-license.

And if you are serious about commercial developement, the price of Qt should not be a problem. If you cant earn 2000$ from your software, what's the point of trying to sell it for profit? Obviously there's no money to be made there.

TT has treated the community with great care. They have bent over backwards to satisfy the complainers. Yet there are still people out there who whine that "Waaah! TT is EEEEEVIL! They give me a GPL'ed toolkit and I don't like it! They must satisfy my every whim and I and I alone can write software for profit, the evil trolls from Norway do not have that right!"

Cry me a river.

Re:Wrong...

[Ded Mike]

Except that the COMMERCIAL desktop development (Red Hat, Sun Mad Dog, Ximian) is all being done on GNOME, and all the free development (KNOPPIX, Debian) is on KDE.

It is GNOME which is moving towards notYET and M$, while KDE and the Qt libs are moving closer to the open, free world.

You can interface any language to KDE, through Qt or Gtk/Gtk+. MUCH more difficult in GNOME. I18N is more complete (therefore, the environment is MUCH freer in reality) in KDE than in GNOME.

Your logic doesn't follow the realities of today...admit it. Anything but BSD and GPL confuses you and foils your evil plans to write closed, non-free software on KDE and Linux. FINE! Write it on GNOME. Watch M$ steal it!.

Re:Wrong...

[Dr. Evil]

What makes you think that they would abuse it, whereas Gnome/Gtk-guys would not?

What are you talking about? Gnome and Gtk cannot strongarm commercial development, they have no power over commercial development. That's why Gtk uses the LGPL. That's why the LGPL exists.

As for the BSD'ing of Qt, as I read the FreeQt agreements, only the last "FreeQt" licensed version of Qt is BSD'd only when TT neglects Qt or goes bankrupt. There's nothing in there about BSD'ing the code after being taken over by a hostile interest and making commercial development impractical. This and I'm pretty sure there hasn't been a 'FreeQt' licensed version of Qt in years.

Corporations only care about money. It doesn't matter who has control over commercial development under KDE, it's that one particular group does and they can do anything they want with it.

On that note, look who's next to SCO in the Canopy group: http://www.canopy.com/

Re:To all the GTK zealots. (5core:5, insightful)

[Sandmann]

Don't believe the promises random people make on messageboards about what will be in the next version of gtk+.

The facts are:

- gtk+ 2.4 will have a new file selector

- gnome 2.4 will use gtk+ 2.2

- gnome 2.6 will use gtk+ 2.4

- hopefully most applications will be ported ver to the new file selector by gnome 2.6

Re:To all the GTK zealots. (5core:5, insightful)

[tempest303]

The new file selector actually comes with GTK 2.4! Thank God, too! I can't wait for this to get finished so people stop fucking bitching about it. ;)

Re:To all the GTK zealots. (5core:5, insightful)

[molarmass192]

I use KDE 3.1 as my desktop, it does look good and the KDE "File Open" dialog is "all that" so far as "File Open" dialogs go. When moving from KDE 2.x to 3.x there were some minor compatibility issues with KDE 1.x apps but nothing that wasn't fixed by a recompile.

Yep, I'm still going to stear clear of GTK apps whenever possible, even if that patch gets applied. Thanks for reminding me why.

You're joking right? At least say it's for reasons more significant than a "File Open" dialog. Reasons that make sense are things like "I want a consistent theme/font", "I need my apps to interoperate at a level deeper than the X clipboard", or "I'm more familiar with the KDE/QT toolkit so if I need to make a mod ...".

Re:This might mean something to me

[DrPascal]

I gave wxWindows a hefty chance, and came up pretty short. I wrote a medium sized utility for Linux, Win32, and OSX, and although it ran in all three versions decently, every crash I had always traced back to the wx libraries, in all three cases.

Mind you, I usually blame it on me (perhaps I was sending the libraries bad inputs), but 90% of the time it was something that'd be from an wx example (straight off Wiki even), and while it'd run great in [oneplatform] or [anotherplatform], it wouldn't work in the third. I gave up trying to balance it and just made a few wrappers of my own.

wxWindows is a decent design (I like their classes quite a bit), but I had too many problems with it.

Re:To all the GTK zealots. (5core:5, insightful)

[arose]

Don't know about the Ximian one, But the current GTK file dialog feels excelent (hint, use TAB). It looks ugly and lack this or that feature, but I hope they'll keep the core intact when improving it.

Qt on DirectFB

[dok666]

You might want to have a look at this new QtDirectFB screenshot:

http://www.directfb.org/screenshots/FirstQt.png

I'm really looking forward to having the KDE libraries independent from QtX11.

Best Regards,
Denis Oliver Kropp

Re:I use linux but IANALH (I am not a linux hacker

[be-fan]

Qt4 will definately help in some ways. In particular, the fact that all widgets will now be double-buffered (instead of just most of the widgets) means that a lot of tearing will go away. Startup time should be reduced a little bit as well. Hopefully, a lot of work will go into fixing synchronization issues, which is the real problem holding back X-based GUIs.

KDE itself is getting much better. I'm using a CVS version of KDE, and can say that things are *much* faster. Konqueror starts instantly, and most apps start in less than 2 seconds. Konqueror has zero rubber-banding when resizing medium-complexity websites, and hardly noticible rubber-banding when doing reflow-heavy sites like Slashdot. The KOffice apps are all very fast, none exhibit any rubber-banding at all and all start up in a couple of seconds. All the standard widgets are really fast --- Juk for example, resizes with zero redraw even with a 2000-item listview. The only apps that really need work are those that use custom views or widgets (like Konqueror).

My setup is KDE CVS from Aug. 8, 2003. I'm Gentoo 1.4 on a 2GHz P4.

Read the article!

[EarthTone]

No wonder you find the online docs difficult to navigate...you must not be paying attention ;-). See the article on dot.kde.org...you will find:

* Model/view classes for list box, tree view, icon view and table

Hopefully this will solve your problem.

Eron

Error in above post, sorry!!

[LMCBoy]

Oops. I missed an important detail.

You can have a GPL'd library linked to non-GPL'd (but GPL-compatible) application code, as long as the linked binary is licensed under the GPL. The application code need not be GPL'd; any GPL-compatible license is ok. Sorry about that.

signed,
Unfrozen Caveman Developer, who is frightened and amazed by your advanced licensing schemes!

Re:Error in above post, sorry!!

[be-fan]

Heh. Nobody ever said the GPL wasn't complicated :)

PS> Nice SNL reference!

Re:This might mean something to me

[Bingo Foo]

Maybe he means he's willing to pay for a commercial license, but his product is small enough that he would rather pay a lower license fee. A reasonable demand

You have outlined his potential reasoning, but how is this a reasonable demand? I can't ask the iTunes Music store to give me the songs for 33 cents if I promise I will listen to them only once and then delete them. These are market driven commodities, and they set their prices as they see fit.

Restaurants are also places of commerce with market-driven pricing, but many of them do give free surplus food to groups as long as they are distributing it to people in need for free. Does that mean therefore that it is reasonable to demand cheap food from them if I'm only going to eat half of it and give the rest away?

Ok Troll.

[HanzoSan]

The point hes trying to make is, do your research. You cannot get all your information from fox news or from government officials and expect it to be true!

The government is biased, this is like getting information about computers from Bill Gates, of course Windows will be the best piece of software ever written!

Re:Ok Troll. [Thank you]

[kdsolutions]

the point /* I */ was trying to make was that while Qt might be the best out there now, it can, and therefore should be improved. That's what open source is about anyway, isn't it? constant improvement!

So I used a not-entirely-accurate analogy, so what! I got my point across to those willing to look for it!

Sideways == Backwards

[GreatOgre]

Or at least in this fast passed world!

Re:This might mean something to me

[rweir]

Their license prices are holding them back.

How so? They've been around for several years, and can afford to employ several KDE developers AND continue to release Qt under the GPL. Seems you've mixed up "not doing what you want" with "holding them back".

Re:To all the GTK zealots. (5core:5, insightful)

[julesh]

You're joking right? At least say it's for reasons more significant than a "File Open" dialog. Reasons that make sense are things like "I want a consistent theme/font", "I need my apps to interoperate at a level deeper than the X clipboard", or "I'm more familiar with the KDE/QT toolkit so if I need to make a mod ...".

Actually, none of those things are particularly important to me. The last one is kind of relevant, but I figure GTK shouldn't be too hard to learn if I ever need it. The first would be kind of nice, but I think nice file handling dialogs are much more important. They set a tone for the application, and to see something that just looks so outdated & clumsy ... well, OK there are worse file dialogs out there (the one on xdvi springs to mind, what were they thinking?), and there are a number of GTK apps that I do use.

But given a choice between a GTK app and a Qt app that otherwise perform the same job roughly as well as each other, the Qt app will win, in my estimation, because of this issue. That's all there is to it.

Another thing: there is no way I could *ever* justify switching to a desktop where that dialog was the standard file dialog to my boss. He'd go nuts. He'd think we were switching back to Windows 3 or something. But KDE? I think he'd just about wear that. Maybe. If it wasn't for the compatibility issues...

Re:This might mean something to me

[phurley]

I'll be the first to admit we have not pushed it very hard (our app uses a very small and primitive subset of wxWindows), but it has worked well for us. It is also the case that I have not even looked at the OSX port, but have been playing with the Linux frame buffer version, which looks interesting.

Rebuttal - rebuttal- Reh Bock Hirsch...

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

I was not referring to CuckOO.o, the OOo kpart.

I was instead referring to the initial Staroffice-3.x port to linux, which happened in 1998 or even earlier. Gnome did not exist back then.

Xine is in fact (like mplayer) just a video decoding app, the widgets are not interesting. Xine is also used by arts and therefore by noatun, the KDE player.

Re:This might mean something to me

[Cthefuture]

WTF are you talking about?

It's a developer license for developing software.

You can deploy the applications you develop to anything you want.

Re:This might mean something to me

[Cthefuture]

Duh, holding them back from taking over the world.

Trust me, if QT was reasonably priced they would simply rule the cross-platform market.

And duh, when you don't give customers what they want they use something else and you lose. Not that Trolltech is doing terrible, but they could be so much more.

Maybe not a puppet..

[Inoshiro]

But that does mean that 5% of all the profits you help give to Trolltech or Apple will probably go to companies like SCO and Microsoft.

All the more reason for careful restrictions on business to business investment. You end up with a tangled web, and the consumers in the free market are no longer able to boycott the companies they want to.

Re:To all the GTK zealots. (5core:5, insightful)

[yomegaman]

Oh yeah? And why should we believe you, huh? Tell me that!